From non-alignment to multi-alignment: assessing India’s foreign policy shift

ABSTRACT Establishing a non-aligned bloc at the height of the power politics-ridden Cold War era was one of the most profound normative contributions India made to the modern international order. This article argues that NAM was a pragmatic yet principled approach to dealing with a world dominated by divisive power politics. For India, non-alignment still lives on to a certain extent in the form of its spirited defence of strategic autonomy and the recent iteration of ‘multi-alignment’ in Indian foreign policy to deal with an uncertain world.