NAM in Cuba's Jurassic park

NAM in Cuba's Jurassic park
Rajiv Desai
Tuesday, September 19, 2006 21:13 IST

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

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