India and the Non-Alignment Movement

Origins of NAM

Non-alignment began as India's answer to the Cold War before it became a movement. In a radio broadcast of 7 September 1946, as head of the Interim Government, Jawaharlal Nehru said that India would keep away from the power politics of groups aligned against one another. The Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi (March-April 1947) and the Afro-Asian Conference at Bandung in Indonesia (April 1955), where 29 states adopted ten principles of peaceful coexistence and cooperation, prepared the ground.

• Brioni, July 1956: Nehru, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia met on the Yugoslav island of Brioni and gave the idea a common platform.
• Cairo, June 1961: a preparatory meeting set five criteria for membership: an independent policy based on peaceful coexistence and non-alignment, support for national liberation movements, no membership of a multilateral military alliance in the context of great power conflicts, no bilateral military alliance with a great power, and no military bases granted to a foreign power in that context.
• Belgrade, September 1961: the first summit, attended by 25 member states, founded the movement. Its leading figures were Nehru, Tito, Nasser, Sukarno of Indonesia and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana.

Non-alignment was not neutrality. A neutral state keeps out of disputes altogether, while a non-aligned state judges each issue on its merits and takes a position when it chooses, without joining a military bloc.

Nehru's Role

Nehru, who was also his own foreign minister, was the chief architect of non-alignment. He saw it as the external face of the freedom struggle: freedom to decide India's own course, opposition to colonialism and racism, and a bridge between the blocs rather than a third bloc.

• Peace diplomacy: India chaired the Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission in Korea (1953) and the International Control Commissions in Indo-China set up after the Geneva Conference (1954), and set out Panchsheel with China in their agreement of April 1954.
• Anti-colonialism: India backed independence movements in Asia and Africa, raised the treatment of Indians in South Africa at the United Nations in 1946, and condemned the Anglo-French attack on Suez in 1956, though critics noted that it was far milder about the Soviet suppression of Hungary the same year.

While some analysts criticize Nehru for supporting China's entry into the UN, some also argue that Nehru's China policy enabled India to manage peace and tranquility on the northeastern borders for at least fifteen years. There is also a debate around Nehru sacrificing the permanent seat at UNSC for India, once in 1950 when offered by US and again in 1955 when offered by USSR. However, it remains a highly politicized issue.

A Realist Reading of Non-Alignment

Realists read non-alignment less as a moral stand than as the rational choice of a poor and militarily weak state in a bipolar world. Neorealists such as Kenneth Waltz (Theory of International Politics, 1979) explain state behaviour by the distribution of capabilities in an anarchic system. Seen this way, India in 1947 lacked the power to stand alone but had no wish to become the junior partner of either superpower. Keeping out of both blocs preserved its freedom of action, kept it out of great-power wars and let it bargain with both sides.

• Material weakness: In the 1950s India had a low per capita income, a small industrial base and a modest army. An alliance would have bought protection at the cost of autonomy, while non-alignment kept options open at little cost.
• Aid from both blocs: India drew resources from both camps. The United States supplied food grains under PL-480 from 1956 and Western donors in the Aid India Consortium (1958) funded its Five-Year Plans, while the Soviet Union built the Bhilai steel plant under a 1955 agreement and later supplied arms on easy terms.
• Interest over principle: When security demanded it, India bent the doctrine. Nehru sought American military help during the 1962 war with China, and Indira Gandhi's government signed the 1971 Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union before the Bangladesh war. India's mild response to Soviet interventions in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968) followed the same logic.
• Hedging, not neutrality: Non-alignment was never passive neutrality. It let India play the superpowers against each other and keep both engaged, which realists regard as classic hedging by a weaker state.

The claim that non-alignment was "little more" than such a strategy is only half true. Critics of the realist reading make three points:

• Normative content: Non-alignment carried values drawn from the freedom struggle, such as anti-colonialism, anti-racism, Panchsheel and peaceful coexistence. India's chairing of the Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission in Korea (1953) and its peacekeeping in the Congo (1960) went beyond narrow interest.
• Not only the weak chose it: Yugoslavia, Egypt and Indonesia also chose non-alignment, while a weak state could equally have bandwagoned with a superpower, as Pakistan did by joining SEATO and CENTO. Choosing autonomy over protection reflected national identity as much as power.
• Idealism had costs: Faith in Panchsheel and in Chinese goodwill left India unprepared for 1962. Realists themselves count this as a failure, which shows that the Nehru years were not governed by cold calculation alone.

A balanced answer treats non-alignment as a blend of prudence and principle. Its realist core, the pursuit of strategic autonomy, outlived the Cold War, while its normative language survives in India's claim to speak for the Global South.

Phases of India's Non-Alignment

India's non-alignment changed with its circumstances while its core, freedom of choice, held. Five phases are usually distinguished.

1947-1962: Nehru's Non-Alignment

India led the Afro-Asian world, mediated in Korea and Indo-China, kept its distance from both blocs and drew aid from each. Faith in Panchsheel shaped its China policy.

1962-1971: Adjustment after the War with China

The 1962 war with China was a blow to India's image as a leader of the developing world. Non-alignment was compromised when Nehru appealed to the United States for military assistance, and he was criticised for an idealistic foreign policy that had left the country unprepared.

Defence spending rose, the Soviet Union began to supply arms, and Soviet mediation at Tashkent (January 1966) ended the 1965 war with Pakistan.

1971-1991: The Tilt towards the Soviet Union

The growing threat from China and Pakistan, made worse by American support for Pakistan and the US rapprochement with China, drew India towards the Soviet Union, which saw in India a South Asian partner to counterbalance Chinese and American influence. China had by then become the adversary of both: the Sino-Soviet split, which began in the early 1960s over ideology, Chinese status ambitions, Mao's wish to lead the communist world and border disputes in the Russian Far East, led to armed border clashes in 1969.

These converging interests drove negotiations from 1969 that produced the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation of August 1971, which gave India a strategic umbrella before the Bangladesh war. Its Article IV recorded Soviet respect for India's policy of non-alignment, but critics saw it as an alliance in all but name. The treaty lasted until the Soviet collapse and was replaced in 1993 by a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation without its security clauses.

Moscow saw India as a stable and populous postcolonial state that led the non-aligned and anticolonial world and could help check American influence in Asia, and for India the Soviet Union became a crucial partner for growth and defence. The two backed each other diplomatically: India voted with Moscow or abstained when the United Nations moved to censure it, as after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Moscow supported India on Kashmir. India still led the movement, and Indira Gandhi chaired its seventh summit in New Delhi in 1983, but its silence on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979) was seen as a departure from even-handedness.

1991-2014: Strategic Autonomy

With the Soviet Union gone, India liberalised its economy, established full diplomatic relations with Israel (1992), launched its Look East policy, tested nuclear weapons in 1998 and signed the civil nuclear agreement with the United States in 2008. Non-alignment was recast as strategic autonomy, the theme of the NonAlignment 2.0 report of 2012.

Since 2014: Multi-Alignment

India now works with rival powers on different issues while joining none of their blocs: the Quad with the United States, Japan and Australia, and BRICS and the SCO with Russia and China. Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not attend the NAM summits of 2016 and 2019, at which the Vice President led India.

NAM in Cold War

During the Cold War NAM gave newly independent states a collective voice. Its main causes were:

• Decolonisation: support for liberation movements in Asia and Africa and for carrying out the UN General Assembly's Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples (Resolution 1514, 1960).
• Apartheid and racism: pressure for sanctions against South Africa and for the independence of Namibia.
• Disarmament: calls for an end to nuclear testing, which Nehru first proposed in 1954, and for general disarmament.
• A New International Economic Order: demanded at the Algiers summit (1973) and adopted as a declaration by the UN General Assembly in 1974.

The New International Economic Order (NIEO) was the demand of developing countries to end economic colonialism and dependency through a new economic model. They argued that the existing international economic order was a form of neo-colonialism that perpetuated inequality. After the Second World War the newly decolonised countries had won political sovereignty, but many felt that de jure political colonisation had been replaced by de facto economic colonisation, so the NIEO became a central theme in NAM, the Group of 77 and UNCTAD.

As a leader of NAM, India played an important part in the campaign for the NIEO, and the economic problems of the developing world have remained central to the movement. South-South cooperation has been a pillar of Indian foreign policy, in the spirit of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (the world is one family).

The United States, in turn, saw India as too close to the Soviet Union: India adopted a socialist model of planning, and Soviet help with heavy industry, arms and vetoes on Kashmir drew the two together. India's leading role in conceiving, launching and expanding the movement added to American suspicion.

"Democracy and nonalignment are part of the long-standing foreign-policy ideologies of the United States and India, and they are likely to remain an important part of each country's domestic discourse. But neither ideology can be an end itself."

"If India's foreign policy elite worried about an American "alliance entrapment", Washington was neuralgic about non-alignment."

Why NAM Failed to Become a Third Force

Some leaders and many observers hoped that NAM would become a third force between the Western and Soviet blocs, strong enough to restrain both superpowers. Nehru himself rejected the idea of a third bloc, since a bloc would contradict the principle of staying out of blocs, and NAM never acted as a single force. The reasons go beyond size alone.

• Size and diversity: Membership grew from 25 states at Belgrade in 1961 to more than 100 by the 1980s. It included monarchies, military regimes, one-party socialist states and democracies with conflicting interests. Decisions by consensus produced long declarations rather than joint action.
• Bloc leanings: Many members were tied to one superpower by arms, aid or bases. At the Havana summit of 1979 Fidel Castro argued that the socialist countries were the movement's "natural ally". India, Yugoslavia and other moderates resisted, but the episode showed how far members leaned towards one camp.
• Wars between members: Members fought one another: Ethiopia and Somalia (1977-78), Vietnam and Cambodia (from 1978), Iran and Iraq (1980-88) and Iraq and Kuwait (1990). The Iran-Iraq war forced the seventh summit, due in Baghdad in 1982, to move to New Delhi in 1983.
• Afghanistan, 1979: The Soviet invasion of a member state split the movement. Many members condemned it, while India avoided criticising Moscow, which weakened NAM's claim to oppose interference by any great power.
• No institutions: NAM had no charter, permanent secretariat or common budget. The chair passed to each summit host, so the agenda shifted with the host's politics.
• Economic dependence: Members relied on Western markets and finance and on Soviet arms. The demand for a New International Economic Order failed because NAM had no economic leverage comparable to OPEC's oil.

After bipolarity. The end of the Cold War removed NAM's original reason to exist, and regional and issue-based bodies such as ASEAN, the African Union, BRICS, the SCO and the G20 now carry much of the cooperation that its members seek. Yet NAM remains the largest caucus of developing states at the United Nations, coordinates with the Group of 77 on development, and keeps moral weight on decolonisation, disarmament and Palestine. Its record is better judged by the agendas it shaped (decolonisation, the struggle against apartheid and the NIEO) than by a third-force role that its founders never intended.

Relevance of NAM Today

For India the movement's ethos now matters more than its meetings. India presents itself as a voice of the Global South, a role it showed by hosting the Voice of the Global South Summits from January 2023 and by securing the African Union's membership of the G20 at the New Delhi summit in September 2023.

India also leads developing countries in the North-South debate on climate change, where the United States leads the developed North, over historic responsibility, per capita against total emissions, and finance and technology for the green transition.

India's G20 presidency (2023) took the theme 'One Earth, One Family, One Future'.

"As far as India is concerned, our engagement with the Global South is not just a matter of policy, it is ingrained in the very fabric of our culture and philosophy," Mrs. Ruchira Kamboj, Permanent Representative to the UN.

"The case for a 'Global South sensitive' model of globalization therefore becomes stronger by the day. In this regard, India stands for three fundamental shifts that can create a conducive environment."

• The model of globalization: from self-centered globalization to human-centered globalization. This means shifting the focus more on development as a whole.
• A different approach to Innovation & Technology: From being on the receiving end of technological patronage, to deploying Global South-led innovations for societal transformation.
• Development Cooperation: From debt creating projects to a demand-driven and sustainable development cooperation

"South-South cooperation must be as a parallel process to North-South Cooperation and SDGs can be met by joint efforts of both."

"India should avoid the temptation of building a bloc against the developed North. Instead, offer sustainable economic cooperation to the Global South through national, regional, and global institutions to further joint causes."

BRICS is a multilateral forum comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates and, since January 2025, Indonesia. BRICS was established as BRIC in 2009, in aftermath of Global Financial Crisis, with India, Russia, China and Brazil as founding members. Fareed Zakaria described the establishment of BRICS as the beginning of 'Post American world order'. It symbolized 'the decline of west and the rise of rest'. It also showed that the centre of gravity of international economy has shifted towards Asia Pacific.

S. Jaishankar has said that "BRICS is no longer an 'alternative', it is an established feature of the global landscape".

NonAlignment 2.0: Features and Comparison with Non-Alignment 1.0

NonAlignment 2.0: A Foreign and Strategic Policy for India in the Twenty First Century was written by an independent group of eight: Sunil Khilnani, Rajiv Kumar, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Lt. Gen. (Retd.) Prakash Menon, Nandan Nilekani, Srinath Raghavan, Shyam Saran and Siddharth Varadarajan. The group met from November 2010 to January 2012 with administrative support from the National Defence College and the Centre for Policy Research, and National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon attended some meetings. The preface is dated 30 January 2012.

• Strategic autonomy as the core value: The authors call strategic autonomy the defining goal of India's policy since the Republic began. The core objective of strategy is to give India "maximum options" in its external relations, which in turn widen its options for internal development.
• Power of example: India's influence will rest on high growth, wider capabilities for all citizens and robust democratic institutions, which is why the report covers internal security, education, cyber security and the state alongside diplomacy.
• China as the main challenge: China will remain "a significant foreign policy and security challenge". India should "hold the line" on the land frontier, keep its edge at sea and build a diverse network of partners that restrains China without appearing to join a containment ring.
• Partners, not allies: India will be courted in great-power competition, but formal alliances erode autonomy. On the United States the report concludes that both countries "may be better served by being friends rather than allies".
• An alternative universality: The conclusion recalls that Gandhi, Tagore, Nehru and Ambedkar shared one aspiration, that India should be "a site for an alternative universality", and that India's legitimacy will come from standing for the highest human and universal values. It warns that "power not backed by the power of ideas can be blind" and that India "should aim not just at being powerful: it should set new standards for what the powerful must do". The idea is that a large, diverse and developing democracy can show a path to universal values different from that of earlier great powers.

Aspect	Non-alignment 1.0 (1947-1991)	NonAlignment 2.0 (2012)
Context	Bipolar Cold War and decolonisation	Diffused power, globalisation and the rise of China
Aim	Stay out of military blocs and protect new independence	Maximise strategic space and options
Method	Distance from both blocs, NAM solidarity, moral diplomacy at the UN	Engagement with all major powers and issue-based partnerships
Economy	Planned self-reliance with aid from both blocs	Deep integration with the world economy in trade, technology and labour
Main concerns	Bloc politics, colonialism and nuclear arms race	China, internal security, energy, cyber and maritime security
Values	Anti-colonialism, Panchsheel, peace	Democracy, pluralism and an alternative universality

The two share the refusal of formal alliances, the link between foreign policy and development, and strategic autonomy as the end. The document has been read as stronger on principles than on hard choices, especially on how far to lean towards the United States as China's power grew.

Multi-Alignment versus Non-Alignment

Multi-alignment means building partnerships with several, often rival, powers at the same time and choosing partners issue by issue. Shashi Tharoor used the term in Pax Indica (2012) to argue that India should move beyond non-alignment, scholars such as Ian Hall have applied it to Modi's foreign policy, and S. Jaishankar's The India Way (2020) sets out the logic of engaging all major powers to widen India's options.

• Distance versus engagement: Non-alignment sought autonomy by keeping away from both blocs. Multi-alignment seeks it by engaging all sides so that no single partner gains decisive leverage over India.
• Practice: India sits in the Quad with the United States, Japan and Australia and in BRICS and the SCO with Russia and China. It signed all four foundational defence agreements with Washington yet bought the S-400 from Moscow and increased purchases of Russian oil after 2022. It works with Israel, the Gulf states and Iran at once.
• Interest, not ideology: Partners are chosen by issue: maritime security with the Quad, energy with Russia and the Gulf, technology with the United States and Japan, development finance through BRICS.
• Less Third World rhetoric: Nehru spoke for the developing world as a bloc. Multi-alignment is openly about national interest, though India still claims to voice the Global South through the Voice of the Global South Summits.

The claim that India has "debunked" non-alignment is only partly right. India has dropped the NAM-centred form of the policy and the habit of equidistance, but it keeps the core goal of strategic autonomy and still refuses formal military alliances, the continuity that NonAlignment 2.0 described as preserving the core objectives of non-alignment in a changed world. Critics warn that multi-alignment can look opportunistic, may leave India without dependable allies in a crisis with China, and is hard to sustain when partners demand a choice, as the US penalty tariff of 2025 on India's purchases of Russian oil showed.

India at Recent NAM Summits and the Future of NAM

India's level of participation in NAM summits has fallen since 2016.

• 17th Summit, Margarita Island, Venezuela (17-18 September 2016): Theme "Peace, Sovereignty and Solidarity for Development". Vice President Hamid Ansari led India, and Narendra Modi became the first Indian Prime Minister to miss a NAM summit since Charan Singh, a caretaker, in 1979. Minister of State M.J. Akbar used the ministerial meeting to call terrorism the biggest enemy of human rights. The declaration condemned terrorism in all its forms and called for Security Council reform, and Venezuela took the chair from Iran.
• 18th Summit, Baku, Azerbaijan (25-26 October 2019): Theme "Upholding the Bandung Principles to ensure concerted and adequate response to the challenges of contemporary world". Vice President M. Venkaiah Naidu led India and EAM S. Jaishankar attended the ministerial meeting. Azerbaijan took the chair.
• Online Contact Group Summit (4 May 2020): Modi joined the virtual summit "United against COVID-19" hosted by President Ilham Aliyev, called for a coordinated and equitable response to the pandemic, and warned against terrorism and fake news.
• 19th Summit, Kampala, Uganda (January 2024): Postponed from 2022, with the theme "Deepening Cooperation for Shared Global Affluence". EAM Jaishankar delivered India's statement on 19 January 2024. He called for a multipolar world with a reformed United Nations at its core, economic decentralisation with more regional production, resilient supply chains and "cultural rebalancing", and noted that "conflict anywhere has consequences everywhere". South Sudan was welcomed as a new member, taking membership to 121, and Uganda took the chair.
• Since Kampala: A Minister of State led India at the mid-term ministerial meeting in Kampala (October 2025), and Union Minister Kiren Rijiju represented India at the meeting hosted by Serbia on 1 September 2026 to mark NAM's 65th anniversary.

Why India has grown indifferent. India now prefers forums where it can shape outcomes: the G20, BRICS, the SCO, the Quad and its own Voice of the Global South Summits. NAM's consensus-bound membership yields little, Pakistan uses it to raise Kashmir, and Jaishankar has called non-alignment a term of a particular era.

Does NAM have a future? Its weakness as an organisation coexists with a revival of the non-aligned instinct, since many developing states refuse to take sides over Ukraine or in the US-China rivalry. Ways to strengthen the movement include:

• Institutions: a small permanent secretariat to provide continuity between summits and closer joint work with the Group of 77.
• A focused agenda: debt relief, climate finance, health and vaccine equity, food and energy security, and access to technology and digital public infrastructure.
• Reform of global institutions: a common platform on Security Council reform, IMF quotas and the development agenda at the WTO.
• Leadership: active roles by larger members such as India, Indonesia, Egypt and South Africa, alongside the G20 and BRICS.

For India, low-cost engagement keeps a caucus of 121 states useful for UN elections and Security Council reform, so NAM's future depends on whether members turn it into a coordinating platform for the Global South.