When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Jakarta last month, the joint statement issued by India and Indonesia addressed almost every major strategic issue facing Asia. It highlighted the Indo-Pacific, BRICS, ASEAN, maritime security, artificial intelligence, critical minerals, resilient supply chains, and cooperation among the Global South. Yet there was no reference to the Non Aligned Movement (NAM), despite India and Indonesia being among its founding members and the leaders whose cooperation at the 1955 Bandung Conference helped lay its intellectual foundations.
The NAM was similarly absent from the joint statement issued during President Prabowo Subianto’s visit to India in January 2025. The disappearance of the NAM offers a window into how two of Asia’s most important middle powers now understand strategic autonomy. Rather than signaling the abandonment of non-alignment, the same principles are increasingly pursued through a different set of institutions, partnerships, and diplomatic priorities.
India and Indonesia have long occupied a unique place in the history of postcolonial diplomacy. The Bandung Conference articulated principles of sovereignty, anti-colonialism, peaceful coexistence, and independent foreign policy that later shaped the establishment of the NAM in 1961. During the Cold War, these ideas provided newly independent states with a framework for resisting pressure to align with either Washington or Moscow while asserting a greater voice in international affairs.
But the strategic environment that gave rise to non-alignment no longer exists. The central challenge facing Asian middle powers today is not simply avoiding military blocs. It is preserving policy autonomy while navigating an increasingly complex landscape shaped by great power competition, economic interdependence, technological rivalry, and overlapping regional institutions. Strategic autonomy has therefore become less about standing apart from the international system than about participating in it on one’s own terms.
That evolution is clearly reflected in the India-Indonesia partnership. Rather than centering the relationship on the language of non-alignment, the two countries frame their cooperation through a dense network of contemporary frameworks, including ASEAN, BRICS, the G20, the Indian Ocean Rim Association, and overlapping conceptions of the Indo-Pacific. In building up their ties, India and Indonesia have placed equal emphasis on defense industrial cooperation, maritime domain awareness, artificial intelligence, digital connectivity, critical minerals, and resilient supply chains. These priorities represent a different way of pursuing national resilience and strategic flexibility. Strategic autonomy has become increasingly issue-based rather than institution-based.
During the Cold War, the NAM served as the principal political vehicle through which many developing countries expressed their independence. Today, India and Indonesia pursue the same objective across multiple platforms simultaneously. ASEAN reinforces regional diplomacy. BRICS expands cooperation among emerging economies. The G20 provides influence over global economic governance. Indo-Pacific initiatives address maritime security and connectivity. Rather than relying on a single movement, both countries increasingly assemble strategic autonomy through overlapping partnerships.
Importantly, the principles associated with Bandung – sovereignty, territorial integrity, international law, peaceful dispute settlement, and a stronger voice for the Global South – have not disappeared. These are ideas deeply embedded in the diplomatic traditions of both countries, but those principles are now expressed through different means.
This distinction matters beyond India and Indonesia. Across Asia, middle powers are adapting to a strategic environment that is simultaneously more interconnected and more contested than the Cold War order. Few seek exclusive alignment with any single major power. Instead, they cultivate diversified relationships across security, economic, and technological domains while preserving room for independent decision making. Strategic autonomy has become an exercise in managing multiple partnerships rather than avoiding them.
Seen in this light, the disappearance of the NAM from India and Indonesia’s recent joint statements should not be interpreted as evidence of its demise. The movement continues to exist, and many of its core principles remain relevant. What appears to be fading is its role as the primary diplomatic framework through which those principles are articulated.
India and Indonesia continue to defend the values that once inspired the NAM. But they increasingly do so in the language of ASEAN centrality, “a free, open, transparent, rules-based, peaceful, prosperous and inclusive Indo-Pacific,” BRICS, and the Global South rather than the NAM itself. The legacy of Bandung therefore lies not in the continued invocation of a Cold War institution, but in the enduring pursuit of strategic autonomy under the conditions of a very different international order.