‘Non-western nation biggest opponent of UN reforms’: EAM S Jaishankar in veiled dig at China

Tribune News Service

Sandeep Dikshit

New Delhi, February 22

Without naming China, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said the biggest opponent to reforms in the UN Security Council reform was not a western country.

He was speaking at an interactive session during the Raisina Dialogue.

Jaishankar also regretted that India was let down when it took the Kashmir “aggression issue” to the UN but “others” made it a matter of “accession” for geopolitical reasons.

“Look at our own example. Very literally, in our first year of Independence, we put our trust in multilateralism and took the Kashmir aggression issue to the UN. Others made it into an accession issue and did it for geopolitical reasons,” Jaishankar said.

“If you say people are playing multilateralism, they always did. We have grown up. It is not that we should be against multilateralism. Multilateralism is a kind of lowest common denominator. It will exist side-by-side with national interests with the calculations and competitions of countries,” he said.

The five countries Jaishankar was referring to are the UN Security Council’s five permanent members who have veto rights — Russia, France, China, the UK and the US. Jaishankar’s quip that the biggest opponent of reforms is “not a western country” eliminates France, Russia and the UK. Between China and the US, the latter has publicly supported India’s candidature as a permanent member of the UNSC.

“When the UN was invented, it had over 50 members. Now, the membership has grown almost four times. So, it is a common sense proposition that you can’t continue the same way when you have four times the members,” Jaishankar said.

The minister indicated that though India had the credentials for a permanent seat at the UNSC, the “reality is we will have to battle bit by bit to create groups which will push for change”.

“On many issues, you will get different combinations of countries and we’ll have to live with a long period of incremental progress before we get to some kind of landing point,” he said. India has formed a grouping with Brazil, South Africa, Germany and Japan to push for permanent seats in an expanded UNSC that is presently dominated by the five permanent UNSC members. The Raisina Dialogue, MEA’s flagship event on geopolitics and geo-strategy in association with a Reliance group think tank, began on Wednesday. The theme of the conference is “Chaturanga: Conflict, Contest, Cooperate, Create”.

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