. The working of the foreign policy of India since the 1990s has resulted in a happy note with the simultaneous expansion of good relations with the all major powers, growing importance in Asia and the Indian Ocean regions and growing importance in the international system. India is bound to change according to world politics milieu and national capability. The country has moved from its traditional pursuit of gaining the power to the level of sustaining and increasing power. However, in concentrating on major international issues and regional conflicts, India will have to find ways to fulfil the requirements of national interest. Luckily, the absence of confrontation among important players of power politics, in the last few years, has allowed India the luxury of converting the non-alignment perspective into an independent and pro-active foreign policy.
But as time passed and the global power equations have changed, a sea change has also been taken place in the perception of Indian leadership towards the New International Order. There is a reflection of India’s attitude of indifference towards non-alignment. The Indian media threw light on such attitude as Shekhar Gupta wrote in The Indian Express, ‘Also, now anti– Americanism will not be ideological glue that once kept NAM together. You might say that NAM has come of age and emerged as more genuinely non-aligned, obviously because there is no Soviet bloc, whose faithful, the tail-wagging shadow it became for three embarrassing decades.
The founding fathers of NAM saw the two objectives; national independence and the solidarity of developing countries. But the change over of the Indian perspective on Nam is being seen in the context of its revised foreign policy agenda, almost exclusively focused on transforming India into a big power. The way towards this objective, it is felt, is to start thinking big, join the rich man’s club and enter into friendly relations with the rich and powerful nations for economic, high-tech and military benefits and a place at the high table where the great powers decide the fate of humankind. To advance this agenda, friendship with the most technologically and economically advanced and militarily powerful nation, the United States is seen as the most promising path.