The framers of modern India had this pacifist streak. The foreign policy visions of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Jayaprakash Narayan were colored by Gandhi’s own brand of non-violence. Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister who also held the foreign affairs portfolio, and Gandhi’s mentee, frequently talked of the need for a ‘world government’. He believed the world’s division into competing military blocks, each with its own nuclear arsenal, was a herald to an apocalypse; only a global government could create conditions for peace, and save the planet. Peace and brotherhood were the answers to the global problems, not wars and arms.
As Dhruva Jaishankar of Brookings India points out, this kind of idealism of democratic India’s founding fathers was also self-serving. They were all too aware of the limitations of their dirt-poor country and knew that it was in no position to assert itself either economically or militarily. Preaching homegrown non-violence and morality-based foreign policy was comparably easier. In order to assert itself on the global state, India thus took the initiative to organize the 1955 Bangdung Conference that brought together 29 independent African and Asian countries. Nepal took part, too, in what was the precursor to the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).
The NAM was another handy tool for big countries like India and Indonesia to quietly pursue their economic and strategic objectives without coming afoul of the Americans or the Soviets. India’s role in the NAM was dubious from the start. It was supposedly neutral on all important global issues; but practically, it was all but aligned with the USSR. Under the cover of NAM and non-violence, it also quietly went about creating an ‘exclusive sphere of influence’ in South Asia. As Jaishankar hints, the stronger that India gets militarily and economically, the more comfortable it could feel in ditching its non-aligned and pacifist miens.
But NAM served not just India. On the face of an overbearing India, creeping communism from the north, and a hegemonic US, a small, underdeveloped country like Nepal found it useful too. Nepal’s leaders too expressed an undying faith in ‘non-violence’, ‘non-interference’ and ‘mutual coexistence’—even as they repeatedly sided with this or that big power to serve their interests. King Mahendra was an expert at leveraging the Americans and Chinese interests in Nepal to buttress his populist anti-India image. Much later, KP Oli could romp home to an unprecedented electoral victory by cozying up to China in his supposed bid to maintain the small country’s absolute sovereignty.
The Oli government still professes to abide by the Panchasheel, the NAM’s bedrock principle, as it looks to expand its global footprint. Again, from the start, a focus of NAM countries has been to maximize their geostrategic options, even as the platform gave them a convenient, pacifist cover. Big powers had their own calculus. India has never abandoned its goal of maintaining exclusivity in South Asia. China, a NAM observer state, meanwhile, wants to be the next superpower by pursuing its own, ‘unique’ political course. The US wants its old sway intact, including in South Asia. What better way for Nepal to pursue its interests in this crowded field than by continuing to parrot the sonorous non-alignment mantra?
