'Stand together against COVID-19': In a first, PM Modi to participate in Non-Aligned Movement meet today

In what comes as a significant development, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will participate in a video conference meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) on the COVID-19 crisis. The meeting will take place at around 4.30 PM and it will also be attended by the Union Minister of External Affairs, Dr. S Jaishankar.

This is the first time that Modi is taking part in a NAM meeting since taking his oath as the Prime Minister of India in 2014. The last time that any Indian Prime Minister participated in any such meeting was the Tehran NAM meet in 2012, where the erstwhile Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh, was present.

For both the 2016 and 2018 summits of the NAM, India was represented at the Vice President-level. The last NAM summit occurred in 2019 in Azerbaijan, before which the venue was Venezuela in 2016.

Azerbaijan is responsible for presiding over the grouping for the period between 2019-2022. In line with this, the current meet is being organised under the leadership of the president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev. The title of the summit is "We stand together against COVID-19".

"We hope that the Non-Aligned Movement Contact Group's Summit will make a significant contribution to the mobilisation of NAM member states in the fight against coronavirus, strengthening of solidarity and multilateralism," Hikmat Hajiyev, Head of the Department for Foreign Policy Affairs of Azerbaijan’s Presidential Administration said, as quoted by Azerbaijan State News Agency or 'Azertac'.

The meet on the COVID-19 crisis comes even as other multilateral groupings like G20, BRICS, and regional groupings like SAARC are having video conferences to come out with a coordinated approach to the pandemic.

Non-Aligned Movement is an idea that emerged in 1950. The initiative was led by the then Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, the then Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and the president of erstwhile Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito.

NAM is the second-largest platform globally in terms of country membership, after the United Nations. While it currently has 120 member states and 17 states which are observers, in the last few years the grouping has lost the main rationale of the existence of remaining equidistant to two powers -- the US and the Soviet Union, after the disintegration of the latter.