Conveying the “sentiments of 1.3 billion people of India” in the annual address to the UN General Assembly, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said matter-of-factly: “…it is also true that the people of India have been waiting for a long time for the completion of the reforms of the United Nations.
Today, people of India are concerned whether this reform process will ever reach its logical conclusion.”
In the same vein, he asked, more out of frustration at the past than desperation about the future: “For how long will India be kept out of the decision-making structures of the United Nations? A country, which is the largest democracy of the world, a country with more than 18% of the world population, a country, which has hundreds of languages, hundreds of dialects, many sects, many ideologies, a country, which was a leading global economy for centuries and also one which has seen hundreds of years of foreign rule.” In effect, a world within the world.
It was typical Modi-speak. The reference is to the long-pending Indian aspirations to become a permanent member of the UN Security Council, where as Modi noted, beginning January, India will fill an elected, non-permanent seat for a term. Whither UN?: As the prime minister pointed out, the world is caught in the web of the Covid pandemic and has no time for what someone out there may dismiss as an ‘India lament’. The prime minister listed out India’s contributions to the world over the years. He recalled how more Indian soldiers had died peace-keeping for the UN than counterparts from other countries.
Restricting himself to the recent years (for obvious domestic political reasons), Modi referred to India’s ‘Neighbourhood First’ Policy and how it has proved itself as a good, large and large-hearted neighbour—and without mala fide intent, as he pointed out. In particular, India rushed Covid-related aid material to as many as 150 countries (out of a total of 193 member-states in the UN, or three-fourths of the total membership), Modi said. It could well be the highest number for any nation, including the so-called developed ones, to have sent out help in these testing times.
Using Covid-care as yet another peg, the prime minister seemed to be looking at the world body straight into its eyes: “Were the efforts of the United Nations sufficient during those times or are these efforts adequate even today? ... Where is the United Nations in this joint fight against the pandemic? Where is its effective response?” It was again typical Modi-speak, and taken to the world body and to the larger world outside—their national leaderships. India has made UN reforms a world cause, and the Indian demand for a permanent UNSC seat an element within that larger and ever more urgent requirement of mankind as a whole.
India now needs to take it to the logical conclusion, but leading the Third World, with First World nations like Germany and Japan, too, already signing in. For the Third World, India’s present-day contributions go beyond the spiritual, yet are as much as they were during the closing years of colonial rule across the globe—after a gap. For individual nations, the taste of their food is in the eating. It has to go beyond pulpit talks to hard, behind-the-scenes diplomacy. It requires hard talk and harder decisions, at times involving our friends and allies.
In the neighbourhood, in particular, India still needs to fine-tune its perceptions of balancing traditional political and cultural linkages with its postmodern self-styled ‘R2P’ (Responsibility to Protect) actions. In effect, it is all about India’s friends outsourcing their quaint perceptions that most of them do not apply to the self. And India needs to begin its UN and global ride with all neighbours (sans Pakistan, of course) by its side, but unaffected by customary/periodic domestic political swings in individual nations.
Humanitarian enterprise: This is where India’s idea of Vasudhaiva Kudumbam is at work, not only as a political idea or a social contract, but even more as a humanitarian enterprise. In his UNGA appearance in person last year, Modi quoted the Tamil equivalent (not a translation), a line from pre-Christendom poet Kaniyan Poongundranar: “Yaadhum Oore Yaavarum Kelir”. It means that as Indians, “we belong to all places and to everyone”.
The last time around, the prime minister said that this sense of belonging beyond the borders is unique to India. What he did not say then or now is that both the Sanskrit and Tamil lines spoke only the language of love, caring and sharing, commodities that have been in the Indian DNA for millennia, and are in short supply elsewhere. Right now, India needs to produce the promising and promised pandemic vaccine and share it with the world, which the patent-conscious West would not dare. The world could be India’s, and possibly India’s alone then!
N Sathiya Moorthy
Distinguished Fellow and Head-Chennai Initiative, Observer Research Foundation
(sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com)