New Delhi : At a time when the developing world looks at India for leadership in the Non Aligned Movement (NAM), a 55-year old legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is quietly deserting it in his lust for friendship with the United States.
For the first time, he not only stayed away from the NAM summit that began on Saturday on the picturesque Margarita Island off the Venezuela coast, but he sent a delegation without the foreign minister, with a lame excuse of Sushma Swaraj”s health since she was hospitalised in summer. She has been to Italy for the canonisation ceremony of Mother Teresa while she also visited Myanmar and Egypt only last month and as such the health issue doesn’t carry much weight.
Of course, Vice President Hamid Ansari is filling in for the Prime Minister at the heads of government meeting, it is only the second time that an Indian PM has skipped the summit, other being the lame-duck PM Charan Singh, though he too ensured his foreign minister Shyam Nandan Mishra attend it in Havana in 1979.
Diplomatic circles are aghast at the treatment meted out to NAM, which was practically India’s baby for decades, finding India being represented in the crucial ministerial meeting on Thursday to prepare the groundwork for the summit by junior foreign minister M J Akbar.
Never before has India gone unrepresented at the cabinet level in the NAM, fundamentally a political movement that has emphasised executive participation – from heads of government and foreign ministers – rather than representation by holders of titular offices. NAM was always seen as a forum to meet India’s rising global aspirations as the leadership of the massive bloc of developing countries was found important as a lobbying force on the issues ranging from climate change to WTO and the food security.
Absence of Sushma triggered a speculation whether India is preparing to make NAM, an international outfit of 120 nations with 15 others attending it as observers, irrelevant. It is the organisation launched back in 1961 and largely conceived by India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru; Indonesia’s first president Sukarno; Egypt’s second president Gamal Abdel Nasser; Ghana’s first president Kwame Nkrumah; and Yugoslavia”s president Josip Broz Tito. All five leaders were prominent advocates of a middle course for states in the developing world between the Western and Eastern Blocs in the cold war. The ”non-alligned” phrase itself was first used to represent the doctrine by Indian diplomat V. K. Krishna Menon in 1953 at the United Nations.
Lest the alibi of Sushma”s health falls through, India has also called off her planned visit to Mexico this month. The alibi, however, falls through as she is to fly 16 hours to New York later this month for the UN General Assembly. Those who wanted to host her and the diplomats from other NAM nations are wondering why a further, five hour flight to Venezuela was then so difficult for her. “It will be taken as a lack of interest in leading the NAM initiative,” says Delhi-based think-tank Observer Research Foundation scholar Arun Mohan Sukumar, pointing out that there can be no other interpretation when both the PM and the foreign minister abstain.
From the first NAM summit in Belgrade in 1961, to the last one in Tehran in 2012, the aims, priorities and size of the grouping have changed. It was launched in 1961 by Nehru, Nasser, Tito and others with just 25 members as a collective platform of nations that wanted to be neither with nor against either of the then two world powers – the US and the Soviet Union.
With the end of the Cold War, successive Indian governments – whether of the Congress, the BJP or the Third Front – have tried to reshape the grouping’s agenda to better reflect 21st century aspirations of the developing world. Every prime minister played leading role in the summits and they included Atal Behari Vajpayee in Durban in 1998. All not only attended the summits but always went with their foreign ministers.
