The Tehran meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) is now nearly upon us. Some 120 countries are members and 17 other states have observer status in this movement. As is well known to most, the movement traces its origins to a meeting in Belgrade in 1961. During the early Cold War the NAM did have much relevance. Among other matters it played a key role in promoting decolonisation. It promoted peaceful resolution of international disputes, it sought to place disarmament on the global agenda and it emphasised the need to reduce global economic disparities.
It certainly met with some success in delegitimising the Eurocentric colonial order and thereby hastened its end. It highlighted the cause of global nuclear disarmament albeit with limited success. Some American scholars, most notably Nina Tannenwald, have argued that it played a key role in promoting the taboo against the use of nuclear weapons. However, its ability to hobble the use of force to settle international disputes proved to be next to non-existent. Worse still, many, including some of its founders, resorted to force when they perceived that critical national security interests were involved. Despite considerable fanfare its ability to usher in a more equitable international economic order proved to be mostly fruitless.
At the end of the Cold War, at least one Indian Prime Minister wondered aloud about the continuing relevance of NAM in the light of the disappearance of one of the two superpowers and consequently the end of the titanic ideological struggle. Indeed for all practical purposes, India’s policymakers — while still mouthing the mantra of non-alignment — swiftly adjusted to the prevailing global winds and accordingly trimmed their sails. The country dispensed with its reflexive hostility towards the United States, it granted full diplomatic recognition to Israel and it sought to embrace the long-neglected states of Southeast Asia. It also ended its propensity for grandstanding on a range of issues extending from the imminent need for nuclear disarmament to calling for a swift reordering of the global economic order.
Many foreign observers were most impressed with the newfound pragmatism that had come to characterise India’s foreign policy and found it to be a welcome change from the country’s propensity to make hoary and mostly meaningless statements on global issues. Even the Indian decision to cross the nuclear Rubicon in May 1998, though initially greeted with much anger and frustration, did not wholly end the regard that India was held in thanks to the dramatic foreign policy changes that it had undertaken. In fact, within a year or so thereafter, the great powers, including the United States, managed to accommodate themselves to the reality of an overtly nuclear-armed India. Subsequently, under the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) regime, there were even public discussions of how the United States and India were “natural allies”.
This seemingly dramatic shift away from the shibboleths that had dominated Indian foreign policy thinking and choices during the Cold War, however, is now proving to be more limited than many had imagined or identified. An influential segment of the country’s foreign policy establishment seems unwilling and indeed unable to shed the mantle of ideology of non-alignment. In its most recent incarnation the term is supposed
to affirm that the country seeks to pursue an
independent foreign policy.
Sadly, this assertion borders on the meaningless. Which self-respecting state with even a modicum of institutional and material capabilities would willingly pursue a subservient foreign policy? Consequently, despite some attempts to resurrect it, this concept offers little or no practical guidance to policy-making. Instead, it has actually become a justification for vacillation, hesitancy and a lack of clarity in terms of India’s long-term goals and objectives in the global order. For example, the bewilderment of India’s policymakers in the wake of the Arab Spring has laid bare the disutility of this concept. More specifically, the shifting rationales for India’s confused voting on the United Nations Security Council resolutions on Libya and Syria is even more revealing of the lack of a set of coherent principles to guide its foreign policy.
The country’s policymakers now face yet another test of their intellectual mettle as the NAM Summit in Tehran looms. Will they join the head of state of a rather unsavoury regime in hoisting a banner that may reflect a thoughtless hostility towards the Western world, demand dramatic but ultimately puerile changes in particular global regimes and possibly seek to selectively demonise some states with which Iran remains fundamentally at odds?
It may still be hoped that despite these dire prospects the Indian delegation may play a moderating role at this dubious summit. Even if India is successful in doing so, it may nevertheless be asked what tangible changes can this very odd agglomeration of states with few, clear-cut overlapping and shared interests and values can accomplish in the emergent global order. Unless India’s foreign policy establishment can provide a compelling answer to this question it should well reconsider its uncritical attachment to what is mostly an atavistic movement with little practical utility.

The writer holds the Rabindranath Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilisations at Indiana University, Bloomington, US