India has said the United Nations is losing its legitimacy by continuing to rely on an unrepresentative Security Council shaped by the outcome of a war fought more than 80 years ago, calling for urgent reforms to reflect present-day global realities.
Addressing the UN General Assembly on Thursday, India’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, P. Harish, said the outcome of the Second World War should no longer determine the structure of the global body.
“No war, especially one that took place over 80 years ago, should determine today’s state of the world,” Harish said.
“The authority derived from a victory eight decades ago cannot compensate for the deficit in legitimacy of an unrepresentative Security Council today,” he added.
Harish pointed out that while the victors of the Second World War continue to dominate the permanent membership of the Security Council, India’s substantial contribution to the Allied war effort has largely been overlooked.
“Around 2.5 million Indians took part in the war and around 90,000 of them died in military service,” he said, adding that more than four million people were killed in the Bengal famine due to colonial wartime policies.
He said some countries continued to ignore or suppress these historical facts.
“An organisation crafted of the victors, for the victors and by the victors did not, obviously, care to include the concerns of the victims,” Harish said.
The Indian envoy argued that privileges incorporated into the UN Charter by the victorious powers in 1945 had given certain countries procedural mechanisms to resist institutional reforms.
However, he stressed that these provisions should not be used to indefinitely delay the Intergovernmental Negotiations (IGN) on Security Council reform by blocking the adoption of a negotiating text, timeline or clear direction.
Harish also criticised procedural obstacles raised by the Uniting for Consensus (UfC) group, led by Italy and including Pakistan, which has opposed the adoption of a negotiating text without prior consensus.
The group maintains that consensus must be reached before a negotiating text can be adopted, a position India argues is inconsistent with established multilateral negotiating practices.
“We remain baffled by this inversion of the sequence of negotiation process,” Harish said, adding that “in any multilateral process, a text is the precondition to a negotiation and not its conclusion”.
“The IGN cannot be fundamentally different from other UN processes, in which negotiations proceed on the basis of a text,” he added.
India has consistently advocated comprehensive reforms of the UN Security Council, including an expansion of its permanent and non-permanent membership, to make the body more representative of contemporary geopolitical realities.
(IANS Inputs)
