From non-alignment to multi-alignment

THE SEARCH FOR conflict resolution, or its grandiloquent avatar, world peace, has been a central objective of our foreign policy ever since India won freedom from British colonialism.

India initiated the lexicon of diplomacy in the post-colonial age. The term ‘third world’ was first heard at the Asian Relations Conference, inaugurated by Jawaharlal Nehru at the picturesque Old Fort in Delhi on March 23rd, 1947, before 30-plus delegations. The number is imprecise because Mongolia and Korea reached on the last day after missing their flight from Shanghai, while Kirghizia (Kyrgyzstan) and Turkmenistan arrived after the closing plenary.

But an optimistic mood was evident from the fact that regional disputes did not impede participation. Four Tibetans walked for 21 days across the Himalayas to claim their separate credentials despite protests from Chiang Kai-shek’s China; and both Arab and Jewish delegates were present. Mahatma Gandhi addressed the plenary. The British High Commissioner in Delhi, Terence Shone, commented in his report to Whitehall on April 25th, 1947 upon the usage of the term ‘third world’. Otherwise, he was underwhelmed, concluding that the ‘pure rhapsody’ of some of the speeches was ‘saved from absurdity by flashes of humour’. But that may have been the last sigh of the Sahib as he took a final lingering look at the old fort on his way out of history.

Nehru also promoted the concept of ‘non-alignment’, or equidistance of the ‘third world’ from the two superpowers of the Cold War. These concepts found their way to the Bandung Conference of 1955, hosted by Indonesia’s President Sukarno, where 29 nations, including China, signed a mantra called Panchshila. Its five points—territorial integrity, non-aggression, non-interference, peaceful co-existence and equality—became a magnet for Afro-Asian solidarity. Nehru took upon himself the role of mentor-star, including to China’s Chou En-lai.

Six years later at a conference in Belgrade he, along with Josip Tito and Gamal Abdel Nasser raised non-alignment to the status of an international movement, where it remains perched, albeit now precariously.

As a principal architect, Nehru turned non-alignment into the focal point of Indian foreign policy, without recognising its fundamental weakness. Jawaharlal Nehru mistook an idea for an ideology.

An idea is not a doctrine, and efforts to dress it up as one only expose its limitations. At its most elastic, non-alignment asserted that if nations signed a piece of paper demanding peace, there would be peace. These were words from a mouth without teeth. There was no strategic analysis of potential conflict, or indeed any dispute resolution mechanism in its woolly ambience.

History has a caustic sense of humour. Precisely one year after Belgrade, India paid a heavy price for Nehru’s illusions. In October 1962, China, a signatory to Panchshila, crushed India’s under-equipped and under-resourced defence forces along the Himalayan range, and drew a military line upon a disputed border. A humiliated Nehru quickly abandoned a basic tenet of non-alignment and wrote anxiously to America for military aid.

Trapped in his own rhetoric, Nehru had neglected India’s security requirements. Along with his Defence Minister Krishna Menon, he consciously downgraded India’s defence production and capability. His investment in starry goodwill seems incomprehensible in retrospect.

You might be surprised, if not startled, to learn that twice Nehru was offered permanent membership of the UN Security Council (UNSC) by a superpower, and twice he refused. In 1950, America wanted India to take that seat, and in 1955, the Soviet Union made a similar suggestion. In August 1950, Nehru wrote to his sister Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, who was India’s ambassador in Washington at the time, that India would not become a member at the cost of Beijing’s claims. In 1955, Soviet Premier Bulganin got a similar reply.

Nehru kept this secret, fully conscious of the negative impact this would have on Indian public opinion. Today, permanent membership of the UNSC is a declared objective of India’s
foreign policy.

Equally sobering was India’s experience in the autumn of 1965 when Pakistan launched a multi-pronged military invasion to capture Kashmir. Some of India’s closest NAM (Non-Aligned Movement) friends offered to send military supplies to Pakistan at the height of war. Non-alignment left India lonely, rather than aligned. India understood through experience that solidarity is impotent without substance. In 1970, NAM members resolved at Lusaka to abstain from big power alliances and pacts; in 1971, India signed the Indo-Soviet treaty.

Half a century after it was born, non-alignment has become a baby with a beard: it has never quite grown up.

Today, India’s commitment to peace has been layered by a realistic appreciation of the shifting contours of a dynamic challenge. Our policy is focused on multi-alignment: a series of parallel relationships that strengthen bilateral partnerships and seek a common approach towards security, economic equity and the elimination of existential dangers like terrorism. India believes in friendship without dependence, and cooperation in the common cause of stability, dialogue and equitable prosperity as fundamentals of the 21st century world order. A globalised world has demands that are different from a polarised world. Stability rests on multi-polar support systems, rather than the will or bidding of powers and superpowers.

The five pillars of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s foreign policy are rooted in India’s national interest, civilisational philosophy, and the republican and democratic ethos of the 21st century. They are:

Sammaan: Respect for every nation’s sovereignty;
Samvaad: Greater engagement with all countries;
Suraksha: Security; India is a responsible power—neither aggression nor adventurism exists in its DNA;
Samriddhi: Shared prosperity;
Sanskriti and Sabhyata: The persuasive reach of cultural values anchored in a philosophy which believes that the world is a family.

These principles enable India to maintain friendships across binaries. Observers and analysts are sometimes surprised to learn that Prime Minister Modi can welcome Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu of Israel in Delhi as an honoured guest, and within three weeks become the first Indian PM to visit Palestine and receive its highest civilian award. But no Indian is surprised. Indeed, Indians would consider it remiss if both did not happen.

Friendships have graduated from phrase-laden fluff to brick-and-mortar bridge-building sustained by continual diplomacy, even as Prime Minister Modi expands the architecture of multilateral relations through personal visits. This is why an expanding arc of nations understands when India explains critical decisions it has taken, and then extends support.

Given its long and troubled history, surely the biggest albatross around India’s neck was surely Nehru’s unwise decision to take Pakistan’s illegal invasion of Jammu and Kashmir to the UN in December 1947. This may have been done at the suggestion of Lord Mountbatten, but it is quite pointless to keep blaming perfidious Albion. Nehru was Prime Minister of an independent country. He should have heeded Sardar Patel, who had advised against the move. The UN became a sensitive pressure point, and there were occasions when we needed a Soviet Union veto to protect our interests. Today, it is Pakistan which is isolated when it goes to the Security Council over Article 370. This is evidence of the goodwill that India and Narendra Modi command.

India believes that friendship is not a zero-sum game; our relations with Washington are at an apex, while Tehran has been a friend of long standing. Over the last five years, many new economic and strategic bridges have been constructed with the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and we are determined that they flourish for the good of our people. Indians constitute the largest expatriate population in the Gulf. Our investment in our Near West includes the Chabahar port in Iran, which is being developed as our trade link to Afghanistan and Central Asia, regions which have been blocked by an obstinate, country-wide wall, forcing India to create sea and air corridors. In Afghanistan, we are engaged in development projects in almost every province, designed to improve the life of our Afghan friends.

The costs of war are rarely secret; but the price of a US-Iran conflict will be paid in many currencies. Both the US and Iran have enough experience to know that war does not recognise any boundaries. The potential for chaos should be measured carefully by belligerents.

So far, we have witnessed a war of nerves, but diplomacy is surely about preventing a nervous breakdown. The confrontation over Grace 1 and Stena Impero indicates how quickly an incident can become a casus belli. If the British warship HMS Duncan had reached the flashpoint earlier, would we have seen provocative shooting? There are itchy fingers at every level of weaponry. State and non-state actors are active across the turbulence of West Asia, fuelled by ideological zeal and sectarian fervour. None of this is in our immediate geopolitical and geoeconomic interest. An obvious danger is that this bilateral conflict will merge into a wider war.

The nature of war is constantly evolving. We often suppose that there have been only two World Wars in the last hundred years. I can think of five. Between the First and Second World Wars began the life-and-death struggle for liberation from colonisation, with the non-violent Mahatma Gandhi among a pantheon of heroes following separate strategies. The Cold War continued for at least four intense decades. We are currently in the midst of a fifth world war, against terrorism, a dangerous, barbaric, immoral and viral epidemic that remains to be defeated.

There is another kind of war that is gradually beginning to dominate the charred landscape: the Long Warm War. It has many commas, but no full stop. It never becomes a conflagration, but its embers continue to glow, taking a periodic toll. It is a state of continual if not perpetual conflict which drains life rather than kills instantly. Its battlefields are rife with false flags. Long War theorists imagine that since the cost is spread, it is containable; and because it refrains from all-out conflict, it is less than a crisis.

For some, this becomes a temptation to use terrorists as surrogates. The only conflict which is not amenable to resolution through dialogue is the world war against terrorism.

Conventional wisdom dates the present US-Iran conflict to the success of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, a year of many dramatic upheavals. But memories run longer than that. Iran has not forgotten the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. The great American trauma, however, is the seizure of the US Tehran mission on April 24th, 1980, and the subsequent failure of Operation Eagle Claw, Jimmy Carter’s military mission to rescue 52 embassy staff held hostage by Iranian militants.

The rise of Iran as a Shia state led to regional tensions with Saudi Arabia that continue to explode in varied geographies. War often seems to be the first option during crises in the region: the eight-year conflict between Iraq and Iran began with Saddam Hussein confident of marching into Tehran and ended in a stalemate that left both nations in serious need of repair.

On the surface it might seem as if the US has been consistently hostile to Iran since the fall of Mohammad Reza Shah in February 1979. This is not strictly true. There has been secret coordination, if not more, between the two nations, through covert communication. The Iran-Contra deal, in which missiles and other arms were traded to fund anti-regime elements in Nicaragua, took place when Ronald Reagan was in office and hostages were in Tehran. It is, of course, ironic that one reason Reagan won the election against Carter was because of the failure of Eagle Claw. Iran was also able to purchase, through third-party deals, vitally needed arms during its war with Iraq.

Conversely, Iran could have intervened, covertly if not overtly, during America’s Afghanistan offensive in 2001 and its Iraq war of 2003, but consciously refrained. More recently, Iran and the US shared the same objectives in the war against the Islamic State. When their national interests have required, the two countries have never made the mistake of letting sentiment sabotage arm’s-distance cooperation.

The paradigm is evident: variables of national interest determine levels of tension between the two countries. This is welcome, because common sense suggests that it is in neither side’s interest to slide towards a destructive open war. However, we all know the dangers of brinkmanship. Any human error can propel events towards conflict.

A Himalayan experience might provide a useful reference point.

India’s biggest border dispute is with China, not Pakistan. Despite the bonhomie of the 1950s, China initiated war across a wide front in 1962. There was serious localised fighting at the Nathu La and Cho La passes in 1967; and the Doklam stand-off in June 2017 reminded everyone that life on a precipice can be very slippery. But if that confrontation was contained, it was because of the maturity of political leadership on both sides, as well as a commitment made by the two nations to non-violence three decades before.

In November 1987, after eight rounds of negotiations starting from December 1981, India and China agreed to maintain ‘peace and tranquillity’ on the border while their diplomats and political leaders sought a mutually acceptable resolution through talks. A major productive consequence has been the rise of trade and commerce. In 2001, India-China trade was $3.6 billion; in 2017-18 it touched $89.6 billion. In addition, the bilateral trade with Hong Kong in 2017 was $26 billion. This has happened despite China’s strategic relationship with Pakistan.

Relations between India and Pakistan remain stagnant, and even septic, for one reason alone: Pakistan’s continued and endemic use of terrorism against India. This is not an allegation without evidence. In July, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan admitted, publicly, that between 30,000 and 40,000 terrorists who target India are still getting sanctuary and assistance on Pakistani soil. Think of the numbers. This is the equivalent of a parallel terrorist army.

As Prime Minister Modi has said, there is no good terrorism and bad terrorism. All terrorism is an unmitigated evil. The only conflict which is not amenable to resolution through dialogue is the world war against terrorism.

The good news about the US-Iran conflict, ‘good’ being a comparative measure, is that it is in the hands of states rather than in the grip of non-state activists. The question before the two governments is simple: will they talk before inflicting serious, if not incalculable, harm on the region, or will they talk afterwards?
India believes that states must find the route to direct dialogue or, where that seems difficult, elliptical engagement. Scepticism about a total resolution of problems between the US and Iran should not preclude efforts for a partial one. Friends can help create the conditions for direct engagement between principals. War is not a solution.

(This is an edited version of the author’s keynote address at the conference on US-Iran conflict at the National University of Singapore)

Chinaforeign policyglobal leadershipJawaharlal Nehrumulti-alignmentNarendra Modinon-alignment