Just eleven days before the Bandung Conference, a conference was convened in New Delhi that should be considered its unofficial counterpart. In sharp contrast to Bandung, which was not open to the public, the nongovernmental nature of the Delhi conference enabled thousands of people to attend. Officially known as the Conference of Asian Countries on the Relaxation of International Tension (CRIT), it was heavily influenced by the growing peace movement of the early Cold War years. Over the next five years, the Delhi gathering’s success in terms of attendance, media coverage, and interest from writers, poets and artists, gave rise to a set of additional conferences across Africa and Asia. It was also instrumental in the formation of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSO), which was formally established in Cairo in December 1957 with support from the Egyptian government. Several founders of AAPSO had attended the Delhi conference in 1955, and would populate AAPSO committees for years to come.

There is good reason to soften the boundaries between the ‘official’ and ‘non-official’ Bandungs somewhat. The unofficial ‘Bandungs’, particularly Delhi and Cairo, handled their publicity so well that media and other observers had difficulty distinguishing between them, suggesting that – to a contemporary eye at least – they were not so dissimilar as events centered on promoting decolonization and combating old and new forms of imperialism. Too narrow a view of the Bandung Moment, therefore, obscures crucial Afro-Asian interactions.