On the eve of the NAM summit in Havana, that Vatican of anti-Americanism, go to Google and see how many cities in the entire world still have a boulevard, or a landmark named after Tito. How many, even in whatever became of his former Yugoslavia? One name your search will throw up, we all know about, the wide, six-lane avenue running from Chirag Dilli in South Delhi to Ring Road. How many others? I could find just four and chances are even these will be renamed, like the Marshal Tito Street of Belgrade, which is now King Milan Street.

Tito is a relic of history dumped by his own. What is important is this continuing Indian obsession with NAM and its founders. In some ways, it also dovetails nicely into the Indian, urban, upper-crust chic nostalgia for the years of the Cold War when America was still the big bad wolf, as it must be now, but when it seemed a majority of the world was united against it, under the banner of NAM, and under the leadership of Nehru, Nasser and Tito, and then Indira Gandhi and Fidel Castro. The highlight of the NAM summit in New Delhi in 1983 was the famous Castro-Indira hug.

Old Fidel is still there and while Mrs Gandhi is no more, her party is in power, and its prime minister will meet ‘brother’ Castro and there probably will be a hug. But what will matter to us, instead, will be another hug, or rather an old-fashioned Punjabi jhapi if Manmohan and Musharraf choose to go beyond a routine hand-shake. Also, now anti-Americanism will not be the ideological glue that once kept NAM together. There will be a lot of haggling over every word of the various operative resolutions, for example, the one on Iran. There will be a lot more questioning of anything overtly anti-American. To that extent, 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, tail-wagging shadow it became for three embarrassing decades. We may not wish to be reminded of it now, but our voting record at the UN from 1971 onwards (when we signed the treaty with the Soviets), from Kampuchea to the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, is not something that any NCERT, whether under saffron, red or green control, should ever allow into our school textbooks. Or our grand-children’s self-esteem will be zilch.

... contd.