NAM in Cuba’s Jurassic park

The Nonaligned Movement (NAM) started out as an idealistic response to the Cold War. Over the years, it was clearly infiltrated by pro-Soviet thinking and became a forum for the world’s anti-Western discontents. Sixteen years ago, when the Soviet Union collapsed, NAM became irrelevant.

Bureaucrat-turned-politicians like Natwar Singh claimed that it was relevant as long as there was NATO. He went on to become the foreign minister, only to be ousted in disgrace; it was a measure of how much foreign policy is governed by ideology that Singh’s theory actually found takers in India’s vast political market.

Increasingly, however, the poison of anti-Americanism is becoming diluted in the body politic; the Indo-US pact on civil nuclear co-operation is a shining example of the trend.

Until Rajiv Gandhi became prime minister, bureaucrats, politicians and academics treated foreign policy as some sort of a theoretical game where clever arguments, moral indignation and a victim mindset are parlayed into policy instead of hard-headed considerations of national interest. Such policies have proved impotent, leaving India feeding on nuts and berries on the margins of the global mainstream.

NAM was conceived by Jawaharlal Nehru as a romantic forum for “third world” countries that preferred not to take sides in the Cold War. In practice, like Indian foreign policy, NAM tilted heavily to the Soviet bloc. Perhaps the most egregious example of the tilt was the lead role played in the forum by Cuba.

In Havana last week, the NAM conferees issued a 92-page statement that was full of predictable bombast, ritual US-bashing, and the standard condemnation of Israel. Indian participation in the conference was lukewarm at best and largely overshadowed by the meeting between Manmohan Singh and Pervez Musharraf.

The summit itself received very little attention from the media contingent that accompanied the prime minister. The story put out by the official contingent is that India played a moderating role behind the scenes, trying to dilute the rhetorical aggression that countries like Cuba, Venezuela and Iran sought to include in the statement.

If you read Manmohan Singh’s remarks carefully, you will hear the voice of India’s growing middle-class that challenges the government to frame policies that are in the national interest, not based on ideological predilections as they were in the past.

Forums like NAM are a haven for ideologue leaders like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and, of course, Fidel Castro.  They are for yesterday’s ideas and perennial malcontents. There’s no place in such a gathering for a rapidly developing country like India.

Just how important the summit was to the Indian delegation can be judged from the call I received from one of its members asking for information on a place in New York City’s famed borough of Manhattan, where he was headed from Havana. Indian participation was purely perfunctory, largely to mollify the spoilt-brat Left.

The prime minister gamely met with Fidel Castro for a photo opportunity. While the photo may have made the hearts of the Left beat faster, to the rest of the world, it was an opportunity to see Castro, sick and emaciated like the Left all over the world. Castro came across as Don Quixote; his brother Raul reminded me of Sancho Panza.

Between the brothers, Chavez of Venezuela and Ahmadinejad of Iran, NAM was converted into a sort of Woodstock minus the music and the pot but laced with the soporific drug of anti-Americanism.

Perhaps the most telling comment came from a dissident human rights group that is banned in Cuba. “Several dozen governments that are full members of NAM are among the worst and most fanatical civil and political rights violators on a world scale,” the Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation noted in a scathing statement, regretting that human rights “are not a real and effective priority” of NAM.

Which is why I am glad the Indian government chose to concentrate on real issues like a dialogue with Pakistan on the sidelines of the Havana summit and spreading its global wings through participation in the IBSA summit, a forum that includes rapidly developing countries of India, Brazil and South Africa, which met for the first time in Brasilia just ahead of NAM.

E-mail: rdesai@comma.in