Tourangbam, Monish

Abstract: Non-alignment, the lodestar of India’s foreign policy decision-making, has gradually morphed into multi-alignment. Irrespective of the change in nomenclature, the point then and now is essentially about making the most of the prevalent nature of global geopolitics for the protection and promotion of India’s national interest. The difference could be that non-alignment guided India’s way in a bipolar world; multi-alignment is meant to guide India’s Rise in a multi-polar world. Multi-polarity is seen by many as more benign than a bipolar or a unipolar world. Many countries, including India, are seen pronouncing that their interest will be better served in a multipolar world order, and India’s foreign policy is often projected as pursuing suchan order. Bipolarity is usually condemned as world of military blocs, which had elicited the Non-aligned policy from India. Uni-polarity has, in any case,never been seen as a natural order or in the interest of countries like India.Thus, this has left multi-polarity as the preferred choice. Indeed, multi-polarity comes across as a configuration, which gives the space for more power centres in the international system to pursue their interests. It seems to allow more choices of aligning with different actors as per the strategic calculations of a particular country. Full text available here.