The world is just absorbing the potential impact of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership signed by 15 Asian countries, including China, on 15 November. India, involved until last November, had opted out, at least for now. Perhaps it is time more attention was paid to India and her global status.
In just a few years, if not already, India will become the world’s most populous nation. Not long after that her GDP will be in the top three. She has huge armed forces and top-end technological capabilities. The historic depth and breadth of her culture and learning is astonishing. Two of the world’s four most followed religions originate from India. She has a strong global presence and her diaspora integrates to produce some of the highest achievers in their countries. She is the world’s largest democracy. Yet, speaking softly as she does, anxious to promote international harmony, India is too often ignored. Think-tank discussions usually revolve around the roles of China and the United States, while the EU desperately tries to edge its way in. More interest needs to be taken in the great innovative nations such as Britain, Germany, Japan and, of course, India. One aspect of this concerns the United Nations, the supreme legitimising body for international action, the repository of global morality, and, for all that, a symbol of international hierarchy.
India’s claim to a permanent seat on the UN Security Council has long-standing validity. Her size and importance and the ‘enormous assistance rendered in men and material to the Allied Cause,’ meant that India was among that small number of nations that were signatories of the Treaty of Versailles 1919, becoming founding members of the League of Nations in 1920, and one of the 26 original signatories, along with the United Kingdom, the United States, China and the Soviet Union, of the United Nations Declaration in 1942. Her status and international credentials were therefore recognised decades before India achieved independence.
As Indian Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi said at the Leaders’ Summit in New York in September 2015: “The foundations of the United Nations were laid by the brave soldiers on the battlefields of the Second World War. By 1945, they included 2.5 million men of the Indian Army, the largest volunteer force in history.” India today is the biggest contributor of troops to UN peacekeeping operations (UNPKOs). More than 200,000 Indian troops have served in 49 of the 71 UNPKOs deployed so far. In addition, India’s current annual contribution of INR 240 crores to all UN agencies, equivalent to $32 million, puts her in the top 21 budget contributors of the UN’s 193 member states.
The Security Council is the key body within the UN structure. It has the primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security and all UN member states are required to follow its decisions. Each of the 5 Permanent Members is entrusted with the power of vetoing decisions. Since the foundation of the UN, the composition of the Security Council has changed just once, in 1965, when its membership was enlarged from 11 to 15. Eight times since 1950, India has been one of the ten non-permanent members elected for 2-year periods.
Had India been an independent nation in the early 1940s, she would surely have been amongst that handful of great Allied powers that naturally assumed the leadership roles in the new world body as enshrined in the UN Charter. But once the rules are written and the members have signed up, it becomes very difficult to make changes. There will always be competing interests at stake and once the possibility of change is allowed on the table then a host of demands will appear. As a former British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, remarked in a different context “if you open that Pandora’s Box you never know what Trojan ‘horses will jump out”.
That’s precisely the problem. UN reform has been on the table almost since its inception but there’s no agreement on priorities, on who should pay, and how power should be shared. The issue of equitable representation on and increase in membership of the Security Council has been seriously on the table since 1993. There are at least six competing visions which include those seeking better regional representation as well as both those wishing to abolish the veto and those seeking to give it to more countries. In any case, no change can take place without the agreement of two thirds of the General Assembly and all 5 of the UNSC’s permanent members – the P5 – who wield the ultimate power of veto.
Over the 75 years since the UN’s foundation, the world has changed enormously. There are now four times the number of independent countries and the world population has quadrupled to nearly 8 billion. While the very fact of ‘World Wars’ was evidence of globalisation, and throughout the Cold War there was a lingering threat of nuclear war, never before has there been such near-universal consciousness of the effects of climate change, of the environmental impact of human behaviour, of global vulnerability to pandemics, and of the finite nature of the resources of our planet. At the same time, the pace of technological change has accelerated beyond most of our imaginations.
Some might ask how relevant the UN is in addressing these problems. Are its structures capable of effecting whatever action may be necessary? The criticism of the UN has been its failure to prevent conflict and to deal effectively with other massive challenges. Like any large organisation, the danger is that it becomes a self-serving bureaucracy. The quest for organisational change at the UN should not therefore be a distraction from other international priorities. The drive and resources to make a difference – whether it is fighting disease, dealing with climate change, combatting terrorism, resolving conflict, addressing the population explosion, spreading economic prosperity, will only come from the selfless commitment of those with the necessary capabilities. It is not clear therefore that a few institutional rearrangements will make a significant difference to how the UN operates. However, UN structures should reflect the realities of today’s world without losing sight of their origins and why they are there in the first place. India has the strongest of claims on both these grounds to sit permanently on the UN’s decisive body and it is in the interest of all the democracies to advance her cause.
