External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Wednesday embarked on a three-day visit to Azerbaijan to attend the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) meeting and hold talks with top leadership of that country.

Swaraj will hold talks with Azerbaijan’s Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov and call on President Ilham Aliyev and First Vice-President Mehriban Aliyeva, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said.

Swaraj will also represent India at the mid-term ministerial meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) which will take place on 5 and 6 April in Baku.
The MEA said “as a founding member of NAM, India remains committed to the purposes and principles of the movement”.

“The External Affairs Minister’s participation in the NAM Ministerial Meeting will underline India’s continued active and constructive engagement within the movement with a view to further strengthen solidarity and cooperation among its member states,” it said.

A range of issues, including ways to boost bilateral cooperation between India and Azerbaijan, are expected to be discussed during her talks with leadership of that country.

Bilateral ties between India and Azerbaijan have grown in many areas, including energy, transportation, and capacity building.

India’s ONGC-Videsh is an investor in ACG oil fields and Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline.

“The two sides will discuss bilateral, regional and global issues of mutual interest,” the ministry said in a statement.

What is NAM?

The founding members of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) were Josip Broz Tito of Socialist Yugoslavia, Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Sukarno of Indonesia, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. Their actions were known as ‘The Initiative of Five’.

The NAM is a group of states that are not formally aligned with or against any major power bloc. As of 2012, the movement has 120 members.

Membership is particularly concentrated in countries considered to be developing or part of the Third World, though the Non-Aligned Movement also has a number of developed nations.

Although many of the Non-Aligned Movement’s members were actually quite closely aligned with one or another of the superpowers, the movement still maintained cohesion throughout the Cold War, even despite several conflicts between members which also threatened the movement.

In the years since the Cold War’s end, it has focused on developing multilateral ties and connections as well as unity among the developing nations of the world, especially those within the Global South.

(With agency inputs)