India’s growing political and strategic alliance with the U.S. came into sharp focus when Prime Minister Narendra Modi decided to skip the NAM summit in Venezuela.
IT HAS BEEN EVIDENT FOR SOME TIME THAT India is slowly but surely veering away from the principles of non-alignment that defined its foreign policy for more than four decades after Independence. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to skip the important Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit held on Venezuela’s Margarita Island on September 13-18 is only a stark illustration of this reality. Previous governments, of both the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) and the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), had started the process of downgrading the movement founded by Jawaharlal Nehru, Achmed Sukarno, Khwame Nkrumah and Gamal Abdel Nasser—all leaders of anti-colonial struggles—and Josip Broz Tito. The NAM was founded on a common set of principles that included preservation of national sovereignty, rejection of foreign bases, defending the right to self-determination, not joining power blocs such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, and fighting for global nuclear disarmament. One of the principal demands of the non-aligned nations was the removal of the foreign military bases that had sprung up in Asia at the onset of the Cold War. The NAM has been demanding the closing down of the American military bases in the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia and the demilitarisation of the Indian Ocean region.
Now India, once the pre-eminent leader of the NAM, has no compunction about entering into a military alliance with the United States. The growing political and strategic alliance with the U.S. and the shift away from the guiding principles of the NAM came into sharp focus with the signing of the India-U.S. Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA) in late August. The agreement, which is essentially a Logistics Support Agreement (LSA), will give U.S. troops and equipment routine access to Indian military bases. In short, India seems to have given up its time-tested policy of “strategic neutrality”.
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