by VIJAY PRASHAD
The Question of India’s Subordination to the ‘American Narrative’
In April 2011, the Wall Street Journal’s South Asia columnist Sadanand Dhume published a piece entitled “It’s Time to Re-Align India.”1 Meeting in Hainan, China, the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) called for a multipolar world (i.e. one no longer dominated by the Atlantic powers, led by the United States) and for a less militaristic approach to common problems—with special reference to the imbroglio in Libya, fast becoming the twenty-first century’s Yugoslavia. Focusing on India, Dhume wrote in response: “Like a monster in a B-grade horror film, India’s love affair with non-alignment refuses to die…. The end of the Cold War should have ended this approach to foreign policy. Unfortunately, it hasn’t.”
What Dhume did not realize is that the BRICS dynamic is precisely a post-Cold War phenomenon. The major powers within the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) recognized in the 1990s that the United States had come to dominate world affairs, and that their main instrument, the UN General Assembly, had been set aside. NAM had few institutional forums through which to try and exert the power of the planet’s majority. The demographic minority exerted their domination through the UN Security Council, the Group of Seven (G7), NATO, and the GATT: this is what George H. W. Bush called the “new world order,” one that emerged out of the detritus of the Iraq war of 1990–91. It was in the 1990s that the large states of the South began to consider a new approach to protect ideas of multipolarity and development against NATO’s Kosovo model of political relations and the G7’s neoliberal economic policies. Various platforms were tried out, such as the NAM’s G-15, the IBSA (India-Brazil-South Africa) group and eventually, with the addition of Russia and China, the BRICS. These are potentially robust forums to provide an alternative to what many see as the failed policies of the G7 both in political and economic terms.
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