Saturday, September 2 2006 12:17 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

New Delhi: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh travels to Cuba this month to attend the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit with India hoping to play a moderating role in the 116-nation disparate body whose agenda is in danger of being hijacked by the likes of Venezuela, Iran, Syria and the hosts themselves.

The 14th NAM Summit is being held in Havana for a second time - the first was in 1979 - under the leadership of Cuban President Fidel Castro, convalescing after a major surgery. Whether Castro is able to chair the summit Sep 15-16 or lets his brother and acting president Raul Castro preside over it remains to be seen.

This will be Manmohan Singh's first meeting with Castro (he goes to Havana after a two-day trip to Brazil Sep 12-13), a global titan who came to New Delhi to attend the NAM Summit in March 1983 and is remembered in freeze-frame images for his bear-hug of a visibly embarrassed prime minister Indira Gandhi, as he handed over the chairman's gavel to her for India to assume leadership of the movement.

Despite carping voices about the irrelevance of NAM in a unipolar world, the movement that began with the coming together of 25 countries at Belgrade in 1961, the present summit will have 116 countries, reflecting a steadily growing membership and accounting for nearly two-thirds of the 192-nation UN.

"A grouping as large as that, and the largest outside the UN, cannot be ignored," said a senior Indian official who is accompanying the prime minister to Havana.

And India's role, say officials and foreign policy experts, will be to provide the voice of moderation in a movement of which it is one of its founding fathers and which sought to chart an often Left-leaning course contested by the US by not getting 'aligned' in the East-West ideological confrontation of the Cold War.

Since the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union, many felt that the movement had lost its raison d'etre. But the movement has shown no signs of dissipating and instead has added newer members - and more and more nations are seeking its leadership role. Egypt has already begun lobbying to host the next NAM Summit three years from now.

For India, the summit comes at a piquant phase in its foreign policy, when it is seen as having moved too close to the US. The summit will take place just days before the US Senate is expected to pass the landmark nuclear deal that will put a seal on the unfolding "strategic partnership" between the two countries.

India's effort would be to get NAM to focus more on economic rather than political issues so that developing and underdeveloped countries are able to speak in one voice against protectionism, disparity in world trade, UN reforms and globalization as well as issues like environment and HIV/AIDS.

"We are certainly moving beyond NAM. To the extent, NAM was time-specific, it responded to the situation of the Cold War. Now with the collapse of communism, the focus has shifted. The focus is very much on economic development. What various peoples of Asia and Africa need to do is to benefit from globalization," Ghana Foreign Minister Nana Addo Dankwa Akuffo-Addo told IANS recently, while endorsing India's stand.

Many countries are looking to India to provide the movement the direction and the leadership it badly needs.

"We look to stronger countries like India to provide the leadership to NAM. It is not in the interest of non-alignment to see India float away from it. Nor is it in India's interest," says South Africa's high commissioner to India, Francis Moloi.

What India would be wary of are targeting of countries or groups of countries and the movement being made a forum or a lobby for countries - or their 'loose cannon' leaders from pursuing their own radical agenda.

With Presidents Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and Basher Assad of Syria forging strategic ties, diplomatic observers would closely watch their moves at forming an anti-US, anti-West front, and India, particularly, will seek to resist any moves seeking to "hijack" the charted agenda of the NAM.

These countries and, in some ways, Malaysia, which sees itself as a leader of Islamic countries, are seen by some as 'loose cannons' that may manipulate the agenda of such a large body to subserve their own diplomatic and strategic goals.