How can America support India’s UNSC bid?

It is a pity with all defiance of UN resolutions, the US feels India has moral standing to be given a permanent seat.

Former US president Bill Clinton once, in a private discourse, said India was the Rodney Dangerfield (American comic actor) of the global order; always carrying a complex that it was not commanding enough respect commensurate with its perceived stature. Getting a seat on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has remained India’s burning ambition and would be a validation of its belief that it is a rising power in the world. It is with this mindset that jubilant members of the Indian parliament thunderously applauded US President Barack Obama’s vague promise that the US would help India in its efforts to acquire a permanent seat on the UNSC.

The US promise of supporting Indian efforts to gain a seat was taken with a pinch of salt in Pakistan and with good reason. The Foreign Office responded by saying that any such move would “add to the complexity of the process of reforms of the Council”.

The reason Obama’s promised support seems nebulous is because reforming the UN is a highly complex and tedious agenda and even though India is singularly pursuing its ambition on this score, such efforts in the past have appeared highly frustrating and divisive for the world body. There are three more states, in addition to India, that have staked their claims to clinch a permanent seat on the Council: Germany, Japan and Brazil.

Reform is inevitable, especially since the world has come a long way since the post-World War II era when the charter for the UN was drafted. The body’s membership has tripled and new centres of military and economic power have emerged.

Obama’s predecessor, George W Bush, wasn’t very keen on supporting India’s candidature but given the current economic mess that the US finds itself in, the current US president’s rhetoric may well be linked, in part, to the large size of the Indian market for American consumer goods.

The surge in the Kashmiri Intifada, spearheaded by its stone-throwing youth, couldn’t have synchronised more fortuitously as it did with the presidential visit. It was a pity, though, that while finding common ground with India as two of the largest democracies in the world, President Obama had no words for the right of self-determination for the people of Kashmir. He did not utter a word about India’s occupation of Kashmir and its utter disregard for UN resolutions that call upon India to hold a plebiscite.

How can America endorse India’s ambition of a UNSC seat given the latter’s brazen disregard for UN resolutions on Kashmir? On January 1, 1949, a UN-supervised ceasefire line was established on the ground, separating Indian and Pakistani forces, to be supervised by the UN Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP). India, through its well-known chicanery, turned the UNMOGIP into a joke. After the 1971 war, it refused to cooperate with the UNMOGIP as an operational force and no longer allows its observers to patrol the dividing line in Kashmir whereas things have gone on as before on the Pakistani side. It is a pity that with all this disregard and defiance of UN resolutions, America still feels that India has the moral standing and credentials to be given a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 28^th, 2010.