Bandung, 50 years on

Half a century ago, when the world was a very different place, 29 of them had met here to consider much the same thing: social and economic well-being for their large and impoverished populations, and an international voice.

Some of the items on the agenda then are missing now, such as race and colonialism. And the non-aligned movement, which Bandung I gave birth to, is now irrelevant. Then the motivating force and the binding element was the nationalism of recently freed colonies.

Today the chip on the shoulder and the accompanying blustery brand of nationalism have given way to a more natural confidence. Then, all these countries were abysmally poor and powerless""but finding their voice, and wooed by the two competing blocs. Today, even though most of the 50 can still be described as poor and powerless, there are also several who are not.

Then, the prospect for Afro-Asian cooperation was based on nothing more tangible than piety ""except in the case of China, whose Chou Enlai stressed Asian-African unity instead of attacking the West as the rest, including India, did. Nor did he seek to export revolution. He also had Nehru's rather patronising help, a fact which he didn't resent openly but used to his own advantage.

Today the driving force for the conference is based on hard economic fact because Asia is where the economic action is""and Asia knows it. The Cold War drove international politics then. Today it is the race for resources, technology, and capital that drives it.

Then, not a single Asian country had nuclear weapons. Today, three openly have it and one (North Korea) clandestinely. In short, the beast has grown both muscle and teeth. The wonder is that it took less than half a century for the leading countries of the old gang to get here. And the question is why some got here and others didn't.

The economists' answer is that bad policy prevented them. The political scientists would look to the diversions of pluralist democracies. International relations experts would blame the Cold War. Failure, too, it seems has many fathers.

The truth is that it was a combination of all these. In the end, though, what remains is a stark and undeniable fact: those who led the conference this time barely find mention in the old dispatches, while those who were viewed as lesser members then are now the toast of the meeting. India and China stand out amongst those whose roles have been thus reversed.

Thanks to its economic and military might, China is as much the towering power now as India was then because of its moral authority, which in the end counted for little. If India was patronising then to China and, indeed, the rest of East Asia, it is the other way round now. India, which used to deliver homilies, is now told to come back tomorrow, albeit less dismissively than a decade ago. While some things have not changed, others have.