Critically examine the view that in the post-Cold War era, Indian policy of non-alignment has become irrelevant. (2003)
Non-alignment was a relational position: Jawaharlal Nehru‘s refusal to join either Cold War bloc so that India could judge each issue on its merits. When the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991, critics argued that a state cannot be non-aligned between one power. The view has real force, but it confuses the doctrine’s Cold War form with its purpose.
The case for irrelevance
- The referent disappeared. With bipolarity gone, there were no blocs to stay out of and no superpower rivalry to play for advantage. Former Foreign Secretary Jagat S. Mehta‘s 1991 article, “Non-Alignment: Mission Accomplished”, treated the policy as having done its work.
- The patron disappeared. The 1971 Indo-Soviet Treaty had supplied veto cover and arms; its loss ended cost-free non-alignment.
- The economics reversed. The 1991 payments crisis pushed India into the liberal order the movement had attacked through its call for a New International Economic Order.
- Practice moved on. Full relations with Israel (1992), the Look East policy, rapprochement with Washington, Atal Bihari Vajpayee‘s description of India and the United States as natural allies (1998), and the 1998 tests against the movement’s own disarmament plank all departed from the old script. C. Raja Mohan‘s Crossing the Rubicon (2003) read the decade as pragmatism displacing idealism.
- The movement failed its test. It could neither prevent Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait nor shape the 1991 Gulf War.
The critique of that view
- The core was reformulated, not abandoned. At the Jakarta summit of 1992, P. V. Narasimha Rao recast non-alignment as each nation’s right to independence and development, separating the principle from the bipolar setting.
- Unipolarity made autonomy more necessary. A single dominant power demands compliance. India’s refusal to sign the CTBT (1996), the 1998 tests and the response to the 2003 Iraq war asserted independent judgement: in April 2003 Parliament unanimously deplored the invasion, and in July 2003 the government declined to send troops without an explicit UN mandate.
- Soft balancing. T. V. Paul (Restraining Great Powers, 2018) shows how weaker states use institutions and delegitimisation to restrain a dominant power, the function non-aligned states still perform in the UN.
- The Southern agenda persisted. Debt, trade fairness and Security Council reform remained live, and India pursued them through the G-77 and the WTO.
- 1991 is the wrong test. Raja Mohan himself judged in 2016 that the movement had been dysfunctional long before the Cold War ended, because members’ interests could not be harmonised; its weakness says little about India’s doctrine.
What later practice shows
The doctrine’s purpose outlived its name as strategic autonomy and later multi-alignment. S. Jaishankar called non-alignment “a term of a particular era” yet said India would never join an alliance (July 2020). India abstained on Ukraine resolutions (most recently in February 2026), bore a US penalty tariff over Russian crude from August 2025 to February 2026, and holds the Quad together with BRICS, whose summit it hosted in September 2026, and the SCO. Multipolarity has made autonomy more valuable than it was in the unipolar 1990s.
Conclusion
The view is right about the instrument and wrong about the objective. Non-alignment as bloc-avoidance and movement-centred, third-worldist diplomacy became largely irrelevant after 1991. Non-alignment as refusal of binding commitment did not; it was renamed and is now practised by joining many arrangements rather than staying out of all.