India demands ‘Major Course Correction’ of top UN body.

India’s UN envoy, Ambassador Ruchira Kamboj, has spoken out in favour of a ‘major course correction’ of the UN Security Council. She argues that the world’s largest democracy deserves a permanent seat on the Council and that current arrangements mean that India, along with entire continents of Africa and Latin America, are kept out of global decision making. India has been at the forefront of efforts to reform the Security Council, which currently has only five permanent members – China, France, Russia, the UK and the US – and Ambassador Kamboj believes that this needs to change.

Ms Kamboj was addressing the Security Council’s open debate on ‘Effective Multilateralism through the Defense of the Principles of UN Charter’ held under the Council Presidency of permanent member Russia. She believes that while effective multilateralism should prevail, the multilateral system has failed to respond to contemporary challenges, whether it be the Covid-19 pandemic or the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Furthermore, global challenges such as terrorism, radicalism, climate justice and climate action, disruptive non-state actors, debt and several geopolitical contestations continue to undermine global peace and security.

India has three pressing questions which she said the debate should address. Firstly, whether ‘effective multilateralism’ can be practised by defending a charter that ‘makes five nations more equal than others and provides to each of those five the power to ignore the collective will of the remaining 188 member states’, referring to the remaining membership in the 193-nation UN. Ms Kamboj was referring to the five permanent members of the Security Council. Secondly, she asserted that the ‘starting premise’ has to be widening the representation of the core institution of the Security Council to more developing countries for its effectiveness and credibility. Finally, she argued that if we continue to perpetuate the 1945 anachronistic mindset, we will continue to lose the faith our people have in the United Nations.