India presses for expansion of UN Security Council

India has renewed its call for the expansion of both permanent and non-permanent seats in the UN Security Council, warning that any reform excluding the enlargement of both categories would be “meaningless” and risk consigning the Council to deeper irrelevance.

Speaking at the UN General Assembly plenary on Security Council reforms on Wednesday, India’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN, Ambassador Yojna Patel, said the overwhelming sentiment among member states favoured expansion across categories and must be respected. She cautioned that proposals to enlarge only the non-permanent segment would merely delay substantive reform of permanent membership “by a few decades”, perpetuating existing inequities.

Patel criticised the Intergovernmental Negotiations (IGN) process as a forum that had delivered “nothing, adopted nothing and reconciled nothing” over 17 years. The absence of a negotiating text, she said, had turned the exercise into “masterful inactivity masquerading as dialogue”. India reiterated its demand for immediate text-based negotiations with defined milestones and timelines to restore credibility to the reform process.

Calling for historical injustices against Africa to be addressed through permanent membership for the continent, Patel urged countries making general statements of support to clearly articulate their positions. She also backed representation for Small Island Developing States (SIDS) in a restructured council, while rejecting comparisons with faith-based groupings, saying “faith cannot become the determining criteria for council entitlement”.

The Indian envoy emphasised that the composition and framework of an expanded council should ultimately be decided by the General Assembly and reaffirmed New Delhi’s readiness to engage constructively. She appealed to member states to shed narrow considerations and work towards meaningful progress.

In her address, Patel said the UN was facing “searching questions of legitimacy, credibility and efficacy”, noting that member states had endured nearly two decades of “artful delay, procedural acrobatics and quiet, calculated resistance to change an 80-year-old architecture”. Without comprehensive reform, she warned, the council would continue to reflect a bygone geopolitical era rather than contemporary realities.

As the 80th session of UNGA begins a fresh cycle of IGN discussions, India said it hoped the new co-chairs from Kuwait and the Netherlands would steer the process toward “tangible progress” this year.