“The West is excluded.” Richard Wright reported from the 1955 Bandung Conference, “Emphasis is on the colored nations of the world… Colonialism is out. Hands off is the word. Asia is free.” This summarised the goals of a gathering that brought together 29 newly independent nations representing more than half of the world's population.
Seventy years ago, the Conference of Afro-Asian Peoples convened in Bandung, Indonesia, to forge a common front of solidarity, sovereignty, and South–South cooperation. Over the course of a week, the gathering grappled with issues common to the peoples of both continents.
Malcolm X, who attended the Bandung Conference, observed there that the “people who came together didn't have nuclear weapons, they didn't have jet planes, they didn't have all of the heavy armaments that the white man has. But they had unity.”
The promise of a united sovereign non-aligned bloc sparked fear in the heart of the empire. Concerned that Bandung would stoke anti-imperialist sentiment in its remaining colonies, the British state strong-armed the Gold Coast and Singapore to avoid sending delegations.
Working hand in glove with Washington, the British Foreign Office manipulated the conference agenda to prevent a resolution deemed “advantageous to the communists” and “inimical to British interests” from reaching the floor. While British diplomatic missions in 37 countries urged delegates to “resist proposals that the Conference should endorse controversial claims for extensions of sovereignty”, the US vetted and screened the contributions of certain allied nations.
Ultimately, however, this propaganda offensive proved futile. The Conference of Afro-Asian Peoples established 10 ‘Bandung principles’ which would go on to inspire concrete projects of Global South cooperation — from the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the Group of 77 — to enduring political alliances that sought to challenge imperial arrangements and transcend Cold War rivalries.
While the United States and its satellites sought to assert their dominance by covertly destabilising democratic movements around the globe, the Bandung countries committed to abstain “from intervention or interference in the internal affairs of another country” and refrain “from acts or threats of aggression or the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any country.”
Delegates were wise to imperialism’s objectives. In the six short years before the Conference, the CIA had engineered a coup d'état in Syria, toppled democracy in Iran and forced Jacobo Árbenz to flee Guatemala.
In Indonesia, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru railed against the creeping influence of Washington’s nebulous security apparatus. Membership of the Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO) or the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO), said Nehru, deprived nations of their “freedom and dignity”, rendering them little but “camp followers”.
“It is an intolerable thought to me,” said the Indian Prime Minister, “that the great countries of Asia and Africa should come out of bondage into freedom only to degrade themselves or humiliate themselves in this way”.
Jawaharlal Nehru’s stance and subsequent leadership within the NAM afforded India a central place in the history of South-South cooperation. For decades after 1955, India stood as a moral compass in a polarised world, insisting on peace over war and self-determination over domination.
Today, India stands at a crossroads. As the world’s largest population and a global South power, it has the potential to lead a renewed front of nations committed to peace and planetary survival. But this path is blocked by authoritarianism at home and reaction abroad.
While Israel’s ongoing genocidal assault on Gaza has brought the moral bankruptcy of the international order into sharp relief, it has also unmasked settler colonialism’s most reliable accomplices. As the world’s largest purchaser of Israeli weapons, India has long underwritten the illegal occupation of Palestine. Since October 2023, Narendra Modi’s government has abstained from key resolutions at the UN, sent Indian workers to replace Palestinians and dispatched combat drones and ammunition to Tel Aviv.
Clearing the way for India to once again assume a position of leadership in the struggle for international justice will require the determination and organisation of the nation’s progressive forces and popular movements.
That’s why this week, seventy years after the Conference of Afro-Asian Peoples, the Progressive International returns to the subcontinent: To celebrate the spirit of Bandung and explore what might emerge from the ashes of waning imperial hegemony.
As a new international order takes shape after decades of unchallenged domination, our delegation will help to forge the bonds and strategies that will renew and renovate the spirit of 1955 for the 21st century.
Find out more about the delegation’s activities on the Progressive International's Wire now.
On Thursday, following its journey through Spanish ports, the Nexoe Maersk docked in Tangier, where the military cargo vessel collected a shipment of F35 components destined for Israel. The transportation of arms through Morocco has sparked mass protests, where dockworkers have joined the general public to disrupt the Maersk shipments and demand an end to Moroccan complicity in the Gaza genocide.
The Port Workers' Union of Morocco released a statement calling on "workers, employees, and companies" operating in Morocco to "boycott the Nexoe Maersk" to prevent the passage of weapons to Israel. According to the Moroccan news site Hespress, a number of port workers at the Tangier Med Port have resigned in protest at the authorities’ decision to allow the Nexoe Maersk to dock.
Pledging to freeze rent and drive down the cost of living, Zohran Mamdani’s New York mayoral campaign continues to gather momentum. Mamdani, a New York State Assembly member and democratic socialist, has combined material demands such as free buses and municipal grocery stores with a popular communications strategy to great success, raising $8 million from 18,000 small donors across NYC.
In recent weeks, Mamdani’s campaign has continued to narrow the lead on their primary opponent, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who last November joined the legal team defending Benjamin Netanyahu from war crime charges in The Hague.
Black Masks on Roller Skates by Amol K. Patil is an artwork from a series exhibited at Documenta Fifteen, Kassel in 2022. The ongoing work encompasses sculptures and performance work drawing on Patil’s own lineage of working-class creative activists and aims to recapture the “pulsating, vibrating movements and sound of ‘chawl’ architecture”. Chawls are five-story social housing structures built in the early 1900s in Mumbai to house mill and factory workers, an architecture familiar to Patil’s youth.
Amol K. Patil (1987, Bombay, India) is a conceptual artist working across performance art, kinetic installation, and video installation. Black Masks on Roller Skates draws on his experience of Chawls, his father’s, performing the dilemma of living as a migrant, and his grandfather’s Powada poetry, espousing a protest tradition rejecting the caste system. His recent work has found interest in the “invisibility of the working class in emergent urban imaginaries.”
