After Pitching Ideas, Time for Some Action in the UN Wonderland!

Despite the proposal for reforms in the UNGA, India and G-4 partners should continue building pressure for the same.

I’ve rarely seen senior diplomats openly angry. But one day in 2006, at the Permanent Mission of India to the United Nations, a senior Indian official could barely keep his fury concealed. The reason was that the then UN Under-Secretary-General Shashi Tharoor had just been announced as India’s candidate for the post of Secretary-General, a race that India’s emissaries to the UN had no idea they were to enter. It was a political decision and one the Foreign Service was taken aback with.

Tharoor, to his credit, secured increasing support from within the ranks of the members of the UN’s Security Council during his campaign, one in which the Permanent Mission of India (PMI) played a significant role, obviously, after having overcome the initial shock. But the greatest challenge he faced and was unable to scale was the resistance from China, predictably, and the United States.

Formally, the argument was that the post was traditionally the domain of smaller nations. It is likely that since Tharoor was seen as the outgoing Secretary General Kofi Annan’s protégé and the Ghanian wasn’t quite liked in Washington, the US decided to use its veto to stymie his chances. Ban Ki-moon, then the Korean Foreign Minister, and described as a “slippery eel” in Seoul, was elected.

The ‘Permanent’ Hurdle

But there was another collateral damage during that electoral process – India and its G-4 partners, Germany, Japan and Brazil, had been steadily building momentum towards reform of the UNSC and that sense of the forward movement dissipated.

Later, as Hardeep Puri assumed charge as India’s Permanent Representative, among his first statements was that he was in New York to see India get a permanent seat on the Council. That didn’t quite happen, but he did manage to get India elected to the Council as a non-permanent member in 2011. With 187 votes in that election, it was a startling success of the Indian diplomacy with an External Affairs Ministry official even being dispatched to Kiribati to ensure that the Pacific nation voted for India.

What UN Reforms Mean for India?

But as euphoria appears to be built over the text-based negotiations leading to a tangible change during the 70th session of the UN General Assembly, imminent reforms just won’t happen.

India and the G-4 have made plenty of compromises in an attempt to get the molasses-like mechanism of the UN moving: from proposing, in 2005, that the questions to new permanent members getting the veto be reviewed fifteen years after the reforms are instituted, to even taking a gander at one idea, originating from the permanent member, France that an interim arrangement of non-permanent members being elected for a term of ten or twelve years, be considered.

If the matter were simply one of being voted upon in the UNGA, the 2010 experience may give the confidence of India being able to garner a plurality to get the process in place. But the veto-wielders will always have other thoughts, as the recalcitrance of three of them even over text-based talks proves.

Time to Act

We’ve heard this tune before. If the Saturday statement from the four G-4 leaders “expressed determination to redouble their efforts towards securing concrete outcomes during the 70th session of the General Assembly”, a Ministerial statement from the G-4 gang in February 2011 “recognised that there is widespread support for a Member-States driven initiative to take the process of the much-needed reform of the Security Council towards a concrete outcome in the current session of the UN General Assembly.” Perhaps when it comes to the UN, “concrete” doesn’t make building blocks for action.

Plus, of course, given how political attention spans last, as in the post-2006 period, priorities shift.

Finally, there will always be the deployment of stalling tactics from groups like Uniting for Consensus, which in its name is as Orwellian as the Ministry of Peace in 1984 which is tasked with waging war. In one debate at the UN, then Ambassador Puri quoted from Through the Looking Glass to place such opposition to reform in context:

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,

“To talk of many things:

Of shoes - and ships - and sealing-wax -

Of cabbages - and kings –

And why the sea is boiling hot -

And whether pigs have wings.”

In the UN wonderland, good ideas can often disappear down the rabbit hole.

(Based in Toronto, Anirudh Bhattacharyya is a columnist and author of the humorous political novel, The Candidate)