U.S. President Barack Obama’s India visit, like the Diwali preceding it, produced noise, smoke, and, eventually, light. In the last category fell his address to the Indian Parliament, particularly his hope for “a reformed UN Security Council that includes India as a permanent member”. It was largely welcomed in India, though some Opposition comment focused mainly on his gratuitous advice on Iran and Burma.
The joint statement, belatedly issued on November 8, when President Obama was already partaking of his last supper at Rashtrapati Bhavan, develops the argument under the rubric “A Global Partnership for the 21st century”. President Obama and Prime Minster Manmohan Singh, it states, want an “efficient, effective, credible and legitimate United Nations”. The first two have been US arguments and the last two ours; their collation a compromise. The US conceding the absence of legitimacy in the current distribution of power in the UNSC; India accepting that any reform and expansion that made the Council unwieldy would negate its role. However, a reform model that will attract a two-third majority of members takes the strength from the current 15 to around 25; the US is unwilling to define an upper limit, though it is perhaps 20.
Furthermore, the two leaders endorsed UN ideals listed as “preserving peace and security, promoting global cooperation, and advancing human rights”. They also underscored all nations complying with and implementing all UN Security Council resolutions, including UN sanctions regimes. Both deserve closer scrutiny.
As a G-77 member, India has been for a balance, accepted at the UN’s birth, between its security responsibilities and the addressing of economic despair, which had spawned communism and fascism. The preamble of the UN Charter, besides the three objectives in the joint statement, also mandates the promotion of “social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom” as well as employment of “international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples”. The Millennium Summit of the UN had refocused on UN failure on these counts; and these are the concerns of a majority of the UN membership. In selectively aligning with the US, India is abandoning its traditional values and a pro-developing country image carefully nurtured over six-and-a-half decades.
Similarly the call for all countries to implement UN resolutions is a double entendre. Is it merely a joint exhortation to countries like Iran and Burma, or is it echoing the Pakistani argument that Indian elevation should be conditional on the implementation of UNSC resolutions on Kashmir, including the April 1948 plebiscite resolution? It is hoped that wiser heads in South Block have foreseen this eventuality, which Pakistan missed, distracted by the US endorsement.
The reality check came immediately with US officials intoning that actual reform would be a “long-term and very complicated process”. Robert Blake, assistant secretary of state, said the US was committed to a modest expansion. The Russians darkly hinted that the process needed a “compromise”. UN reform is a process which cannot be finessed by a India-US compact. US support is important; its opposition lethal. Its endorsement lifts a major hurdle and has an important effect on the silent majority of UN membership. The next steps by India have to be carefully crafted. What needs to be abjured is the crass triumphalism over Indian election to a non-permanent seat of UNSC. If India got 187 votes against an uncontested Asian seat, Colombia got 186 and South Africa 182.
Even more inept was the South Block hyping of the 10th RIC (Russia, India, China), foreign ministers meeting at Wuhan on November 15-16. There were leaks that India would convert a dithering Russia and a dissimulating China on India’s permanent UNSC seat. The recalcitrant two, instead, closed ranks and patronisingly welcomed India as a non-permanent member, besides crafting anodyne words on UN reform. Russia should have been tackled at the Prime Minister’s level during President Dmitry Medvedev’s forthcoming visit to India as a precondition to strategic engagement. An isolated China would then have been easier to contend with.
Paul Kennedy’s definitive book on the UN, The Parliament of Man, borrows its title from the 19th century poet Alfred Tennyson’s youthful work Locksley Hall, which presciently predicted in 1837 that the only answer to strife and war was the creation of “The Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World”. US President Harry Truman, who hosted the 1945 San Francisco meeting leading to the UN’s birth, always carried the full passage in his purse. Mr Obama’s acceptance of the UN’s imperfection is a step towards that vision; Indian panic a step away. A stout heart and wise diplomacy will ensure triumph over African disunity, P-5 status quo-ism, Coffee Club sabotage and membership’s reform fatigue. The issue is not Indian membership, it is the achievement of Tennyson’s vision, which was dreamt in 1945 but subverted in the writing of the Charter. India can lose sight of that to its own peril.

The author is a former secretary in the external affairs ministry