The last time Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee reflected on the non-aligned movement (NAM), he and his party coined the phrase "genuine non-alignment". That was in the 1970s. They wanted India to remain truly equi-distant between the two power blocs of the Cold War era and endorsed the western view that NAM had often `tilted' to the left, offering more membership to the allies of the Soviet bloc than of the western alliance.
The time has perhaps come for Mr Vajpayee to express one more home truth at next week's NAM Summit in South Africa. He must ask for the closure of the club and its takeover by a more forward-looking organisation of all developing countries -- a poor man's OECD.
For newly decolonised developing countries, non-alignment began as a practical way of dealing with a divided world. Caught between contending power blocs and unable or unwilling to take sides, many of the newly liberated colonies opted out of the Cold War and pursued a strategy of independent national development. The eminent Polish economist and the co-founder of `Keynesian' economics, Michal Kalecki, described these nations as "intermediate regimes" which pursued a policy of "neutrality between the two blocs" as a way of balancing antagonistic social classes at home which were pulling them towards one or the other side. "The intermediate regimes are the proverbial clever calves that suck two cows" said Kalecki, "each bloc gives them financial aid competing with the other."
It can be argued that even as one of NAM's founding fathers, Jawaharlal Nehru, had such a pragmatic and `instrumentalist' view of non-alignment (see Sanj-aya Baru, "The Economic Dime-nsion of India's Foreign Policy", in World Affairs: The Journal of International Issues, Delhi-Geneva, April-June 1998). How-ever, by the 1970s and clearly by the 1980s, NAM had evolved from being a "bargaining strategy" of developing economies into an ideologically-oriented movement wh-ere rhetoric had overtaken purposive action. NAM summits have been reduced to talking shops and at critical moments like the indefinite extension of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), NAM proved to be a toothless tiger, all roar and no bite. No wonder that former Prime Minister, P V Naras-imha Rao, preferred to skip NAM summits just to make the point that NAM was no longer a Holy Cow for India's foreign policy.
Indeed, Prime Minister Vajpayee will lose nothing skipping the South Africa summit, especially with the South African government not particularly warming up to India.
All this is not to suggest that developing countries do not need a forum to express their genuine and common concerns about global inequalities and barriers to development. The correct platform for such action are associations like G-77 and G-15, and not NAM. Developing countries require their equivalent of the G-8 and OECD. The G-15 was conceived as a parallel to G-8 but has failed to take off. Even getting a quorum at G-15 summits has now become a problem. However, efforts must continue to reactivate this forum. It requires a proper secretariat and here the South Centre could have helped. But by locating it in Geneva and not funding it properly, the South Centre has failed to emerge as a counterpoint to the OECD Secretariat in Paris and its Development Centre.
A group of eminent economists from NAM (India was represented on the group by former Planning Commission member, Abid Hussain) have submitted a report to the NAM's South Africa summit suggesting that NAM should jointly address the South's concerns relating to inequities in international trade and investment flows and regimes and that NAM should focus on good governance within the developing world. If NAM travels down this path it will soon tread on the feet of G-77, G-15, Unctad and so on. Then why NAM? This is the era of mergers and consolidation and NAM might benefit by merging with G-77. If some NAM members don't qualify for G-77 membership because they are not developing economies, good for them, let them go home.
Closer home, there is some cleaning up to be done as well. At the New Delhi summit of NAM in 1983, India valiantly offered to set up a "research and information system for the non-aligned and other developing countries". This one-line statement became the name of an institution, referred to for convenience as RIS. RIS was supposed to be the think-tank for the non-aligned nations and after 15 years of existence it has not even been able to serve as a think-tank for the ministry of external affairs, which funds the institution. Not only has the world in which India operates changed, but India's relations with the world have changed and, more importantly, India's views on how it should relate to the world have changed.
In this fast changing world, institutions like the RIS still cling to out-dated world views because their mandate is outdated. Moreover, RIS's mandate has increasingly been eaten into by other institutions with greater policy focus, like the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT), the Indian Council for Research in International Economic Relations (ICRIER) and the Institute of Defence Studies and Analysis (IDSA).
Just as the time has come to wind up NAM, the time has also come to restructure RIS into a South Centre with a focus on India's relations with the developing world. But for India's foreign policy establishment, non-alignment is still a Holy Cow and any practical suggestion of this sort will be considered heresy.
