From Bandung to NAM: Non-alignment and Indian Foreign Policy, 1947–65

Abstract

This article seeks to clarify the relationship between non-alignment as the most distinctive feature of Indian foreign policy thinking during the Cold War and India's interest in helping form the non-aligned movement (NAM). Precisely because of the early success of its independent non-aligned policy, India's decision to join and help shape the non-aligned movement needs explaining. This article offers new historical evidence to argue that India's decision to associate with the non-aligned movement – and thereby turn away from the racialised legacy of the Bandung Conference – was driven by contingent political factors rather than the intellectual and moral superiority of non-alignment over racialism.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to two anonymous referees and James Chiriyankandath for their helpful comments and to the East–West Center Washington for their support during the writing of this article.

Notes

1. The literature on non-alignment often conflated these two positions, e.g., Richard L. Park, ‘India's Foreign Policy’ in the long-standard foreign policy textbook edited by Roy Macridis (1976). By the 1970s, the ‘legacy of decolonisation’ largely dropped away, and the Cold War became the primary explanatory context for international developments. Compare for instance, Heimsath and Mansingh's exemplary study of Indian foreign policy (1971) with Park's essay cited above. In the important study of the Cold War in Asia edited by Nagai Yonosuke and Akira Iriye (1977), only one chapter (by George Kahin) considers the mutual effects of decolonisation and the Cold War in explaining foreign policy behaviour of Asian states. See also Stargardt (1989: 561–595).

2. Krishna Menon would, perhaps not surprisingly, tell Michael Brecher that the idea of non-alignment came simultaneously to him and to Nehru (Brecher, 1968: 3).

3. His over-reliance on materialist analysis leads the otherwise astute Achin Vanaik to dismiss the important of national sovereignty concerns as ‘important if mundane’ (Vanaik, 1990: 234).

4. See Robert Young (2001) for mention of some of the other important non-state precursors to the Asian Relations Conference. An important but rarely discussed conference includes the Japanese-sponsored ‘Greater East Asia Conference’ of November 1943, attended by representatives of Thailand, Manchukuo (Japanese Manchuria), Philippines, Burma, the Nanking government in China, and Subhas Chandra Bose, representing Free India.

5. As early as six months after Bandung, Nehru and others had to restrain Kotelawala from trying to get the UAR (Egypt) to agree to host the next Asian–African conference. Few were ready for another conference that quickly. Through the late 1950s, suggestions were repeatedly raised about holding another conference, especially by Indonesia and, especially as the Sino-Soviet split deepened, China (India, 1955).

6. As the Indian Foreign Ministry put it, disingenuously, ‘There is a certain amount of propaganda to the effect that our proposal regarding the Soviet Union and Malaysia was intended to wreck the Preparatory Conference and to prevent the main conference being held. This, of course, is absolutely groundless. We are very much interested in the success of the Second Afro-Asian Conference, and it is for this reason that we feel that important countries like Malaysia and the Soviet Union should not be excluded. In fact, participation by the Soviet Union is likely to add to the success of the conference’ (Bandung Collection, 1964: 2).