NEW DELHI: Since the beginning of this year, India has had its immediate volatile neighbour - Pakistan - as a colleague at the United Nations Security Council. Indian diplomats, however, remain sanguine that it would not create too much friction at the horseshoe table.
This is the fourth time that India and Pakistan have overlapping terms as non-permanent members, with the previous instances being in 1968, 1977 and 1984. Both are currently serving their seventh term as non-permanent members of the UNSC.
While both countries still continue to be locked in perpetual cold war, Indian diplomats do not expect to see much cause for trouble from Pakistan on international issues, pointing to previous terms.
“When an analysis was done of previous instances when India and Pakistan were together, it was found that their voting converged 100 per cent,” said a senior MEA official. Last year, the UNSC adopted 65 resolutions, out of which 62 were adopted unanimously by all 15 members. India had, however, voted against the majority only on the UNSC Resolution 1973 adopted in March, which authorised a no-fly zone and protection of population in Libya.
Diplomatic sources point out that if Pakistan had been on the UNSC last year, it would most likely have voted on the same lines as India.
Further, Indian officials say that Pakistan’s internal politics is right now too challenging with civil-military relations stretched to the limit over the ‘memogate’ controversy.
Incidentally, Pakistan’s permanent representative (PR) to UN is not a career diplomat but a political diplomat - Abdullah Hussain Haroon - a scion of the powerful Haroon family which owns Pakistan’s Dawn media group. Haroon and India’s PR to UN Hardeep Singh Puri are known to have very friendly relations.
Also, Haroon had publicly thanked India for supporting its UNSC candidature, howver, officials contend that India had cast its vote in favour of Kyrgyzstan.
Both the south Asian countries prefer not to be at the front line of any opposition and would like to be behind China and Russia on contentious issues.