Is India distancing itself from the Non-Aligned Movement? That was the first question raised when Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced his decision to skip the 17th NAM Summit which concluded on Sunday in the plush Island resort of Margarita, Venezuela. As one of the five founder members of the movement, India has always been an active member of the Cold War era grouping, which now has 120 members from the developing nations.
Caretaker Prime Minister Charan Singh in 1979 was the only other Prime Minister to have skipped the summit, held every three years just before the annual UN General Assembly in New York. Various reasons are being touted for the Prime Minister Modi’s decision to give this year’s summit a miss, and letting Vice President Hamid Ansari and Minister of State for External Affairs M J Akbar represent India instead. One uncharitably suggests that Mr Modi wants to distance himself from a grouping championed by Congress leader and India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharhal Nehru. The obvious response to that would be that the Prime Minister is also skipping the UNGA, so does that mean he wants distance himself from that world body too? Another suggests that the end of the Cold War and India’s growing dalliance with the United States makes non-alignment increasingly irrelevant. But given that NAM is the world’s largest grouping of nations after the UN, that too seems a bit far-fetched. At the summit, Pakistan launched a broadside on human rights violations in Kashmir and blocked a proposal to launch a working group on terrorism. Attacking Pakistan as a sponsor of terror, M J Akbar declared that Pakistan’s continuous invidious attempts to keep raising the (Kashmir) issue …is a voice crying in the wilderness,” and promised a befitting response to the terrorist attack on the army camp at Uri. Mr Modi may have skipped NAM, but India was well represented.