nam summits

NAM------FOUR RUNNER OF NON ALIGNMENT MOVEMENT WAS BANDUNG CONFERENCE




NON ALIGNED--- TERM COINED BY KRISHNAN MENON





FIRST OFFICIAL NAM SUMMIT----BELGRADE, 1961





Non-Alignment Movement and 16th NAM Summit
 Its 16th summit
took place in Tehran, Iran in 2012 and representatives of 120 nations attended it.
 The main agenda were the Syrian crisis, nuclear disarmament and human rights. Iran supports the
Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria and is fending off United States sanctions because of its nuclear
programme, which it insists is peaceful.
 Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi criticised the Assad regime and declared “solidarity with the Syrian
people”.
 Amnesty International called on the Iranian government to release all political prisoners and named
nine prominent people who remain in jail, often in bad conditions, including trade unionists, lawyers
and Christian and Baha’i religious leaders.’
 The main resolutions of the summit were to condemn US sanctions against Iran, support the Palestinian
struggle and combat Islamophobia and racism globally.
India’s stand:
For a country like India, whose two decades of economic growth have made it an important player on the global
stage, the non-aligned movement remains a necessary reflection of its anti-colonial heritage. But it is no longer
the only, or even the principal, forum for its international ambitions. Amidst controversial Nonalignment 2.0, it
can’t be denied that India is moving increasingly beyond non-alignment as "multi-alignment" - maintaining a
series of relationships, in different configurations, some overlapping, some not, with a variety of countries for
different purposes.
Thus India is simultaneously a member of the Non-Aligned Movement and of the Community of Democracies,
where it serves alongside the same imperial powers that NAM decries. It has a key role in both the G-77 (the
"trade union" of developing countries) and the G-20 (the "management" of the globe's macro-economic issues).
An acronym-laden illustration of what multi-alignment means lies in India's membership of IBSA (the South-
South cooperation mechanism that unites it with Brazil and South Africa), of RIC (the trilateral forum with Russia
and China), of BRICS (which brings all four of these partners together) and of BASIC (the environmentalnegotiation
group which adds China to Ibsa but not Russia). India belongs to all of these groupings; all serve its
interests in different ways. That is the manner in which India pursues its place in the world, and the non-aligned
movement is largely seems to more incidental than historical to it.