Was non-alignment neutrality?

Non-alignment is often taught as India sitting on the fence of the Cold War. The man most identified with it said the opposite, to the United States Congress, in 1949. The difference between neutrality and non-alignment is a favourite of the PSIR examiner, and it is easiest to answer from the record: the law of neutrality on one side, and what the non-aligned countries wrote down about themselves on the other.

What does neutrality mean?

A legal status in a war between other states. The Hague Convention (V) of 18 October 1907 sets out the rights and duties of neutral powers in a war on land. Its first article reads: “The territory of neutral Powers is inviolable.” The states at war may not move troops or convoys across it, and a neutral state that receives soldiers fleeing a battle must intern them away from the fighting.

So neutrality is about a war, and about staying out of it. It says nothing about which side is right.

What did Nehru say?

That India would stay out of the blocs, and would not be neutral. In September 1946, as the member for external affairs in the Interim Government, he said India would keep away from the power politics of groups aligned against one another. Three years later, on 13 October 1949, he addressed the House of Representatives and the Senate in Washington:

“Where freedom is menaced or justice threatened or where aggression takes place, we cannot be and shall not be neutral.”

The confusion he was answering has lasted. The US House of Representatives' own history page, describing that visit, says India had “proclaimed itself neutral in the developing Cold War”. Nehru's speech that day said the opposite.

What did Bandung add?

A set of principles, agreed by 29 countries of Asia and Africa. The final communiqué of the Asian-African Conference at Bandung, adopted on 24 April 1955, listed ten. Two of them are about defence, and they are worth reading together. The fifth is “respect for the right of each nation to defend itself singly or collectively, in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations.” The sixth begins with “abstention from the use of arrangements of collective defence to serve the particular interests of any of the big powers.”

So Bandung did not ask countries to give up defence pacts. It asked them not to make pacts that served the big powers. That is the line non-alignment drew: not against alliances as such, but against being drawn into someone else's.

How does the movement define a member?

By what it stays out of, and by what it supports. The first summit of non-aligned countries met in Belgrade, then the capital of Yugoslavia, from 1 to 6 September 1961, at Yugoslavia's initiative, with 25 founding members. The criteria for membership, as India's Ministry of External Affairs sets them out, ask that a country:

• follow an independent policy based on coexistence and non-alignment;
• consistently support movements for national independence;
• not be a member of a multilateral military alliance concluded in the context of great-power conflicts;
• have no bilateral military agreement or regional defence pact, and grant no military bases, concluded or conceded in the context of those conflicts.

The ministry's document says these criteria, with the Bandung principles, decide who may join, as a member or as an observer. The second of them is the one a neutral state could not accept: it asks members to take a side.

What was India's part?

A founder's. Nehru set out the policy before the movement existed, and, by the Ministry of External Affairs' account, the Belgrade conference of 1961 accepted Panchsheel, the five principles of peaceful coexistence India had championed, as its principled core. India hosted the seventh summit, in New Delhi in March 1983, and held the chair after it: the UN's records name Indira Gandhi as head of the movement in 1983 and Rajiv Gandhi as its chairman in 1985. The ministry's list counts 120 member states and 17 observer countries.

So, was it neutrality?

No, on three counts. Neutrality is a status in a war; non-alignment was a policy, in peace as much as in war. Neutrality means staying out of a conflict; non-alignment meant staying out of the blocs while taking positions on the conflicts themselves, which Nehru said in terms. And the movement's own criteria ask members to support independence movements. The fair criticism is a different one: whether India always judged each question on its merits, as the policy promised. That is an argument about practice, and a good answer keeps it apart from the definition.