Dhaka, May 2 -- Seven decades have passed since that seminal moment in Third World history when, in April 1955, the leaders of 29 countries gathered in the Indonesian city of Bandung to carve out the contours of a Non-Aligned identity during the global Manichean binaries produced by the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Led by India and Indonesia, the participating nations, all of them from Asia or Africa, and many of them newly decolonised and others about to win freedom, sought to give the developing, or Third World, an agency of its own that would not be held hostage by either the capitalist First World or the communist Second World.

The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) that grew out of the Bandung conference lived up...