India to focus on multipolarity at UN

Sandeep Dikshit
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, December 31

India from Friday will sit in the 15-nation United Nations Security Council (UNSC) for the next two years.

This is the eighth time that India has won the election as a non-permanent member of the UNSC. Its only loss was to Japan in the early 90s.

“Not a single thing has moved. Is this the type of the process we want or can we collectively come to a slightly better process which will yield results?’’ asked TS Tirumurti, India’s permanent representative to the UN, about India’s aspiration to become a permanent member. “We will be a country which will reinforce multilateralism. We will like to have a more cooperative structure in which we genuinely look out and find solutions and go beyond the rhetoric,’’ he added. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s plan to convert India’s non-permanent presence at the UNSC from 2021 to 2022 into a permanent membership is in disarray due to hostilities with China and a quasi-estrangement with Russia.

“The current multilateralism is not factoring in multipolarity. When you have a structure, which is able to accommodate the multipolarity, then automatically (there is) a more responsive, more rule-bound and more inclusive process,” he said.

Tirumurti also said India would play a balancing role at a time when the five permanent members were badly divided. “The UN is losing coherence and we hope to bring this back by focusing on issues of priority,” he observed.