By Kabir Taneja
Permanent membership of the increasingly anachronistic body would offer prestige, but little else.
While on a recent visit to Paris, France, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, made a clear pitch for the country’s bid for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). The UNSC is one of the world’s most prestigious “big boys group,” in which all permanent members (the U.S., U.K., China, Russia and France) combine the organization’s collective elitism with questionable results leading the biggest multilateral forum for peace, justice and prosperity in the world.
Certainly on some levels, India’s aspiration makes sense. The country represents more than 1.2 billion people, has the economic might to back its bid, and is now relevant enough in all aspects of global politics to hold its own in the UNSC. The point of distinction here is not to question if and why India should become a member, but rather to ponder the relevance of the UNSC in today’s world.
Headquartered in New York, the UN was constituted in 1945 to replace the ineffective League of Nations (1919), with the aspiration of avoiding another armed conflict on the scale of World War II. However, over the past decade and more, the UN has succumbed to the agenda-driven workings of its main financiers in the West. The past few years have shown the UN less as an organization that prevents armed conflict – its raison d’être – than as one that tries to pick up the pieces. Today, the UN is largely home to an enormous bureaucracy, a parking spot for political appointees working alongside a minority of diligent idealists who still believe in the organization’s original goals.
India, however, has been a champion of almost all causes and workings of the United Nations and New Delhi has maintained an excellent commitment to the organization and its various arms. The hallmark of this is seen in the commitment that India (and other South Asian nations) have made to UN peacekeeping missions in various conflict zones around the world.
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