India will become a permanent member of the UN Security Council by January 1 2006

Society Pakistan & World Affairs
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After fifteen years finally India got what it wanted. A permanent member of the security council by Jan 1 , 2006 for the world’s largest democracy. I think China supporting India, was the final step. Not sure whether Pakistan would support this move.

Clock ticks on Security Council seat

K.P. NAYAR

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1050221/asp/frontpage/story_4404728.asp

New York, Feb. 20: India will become a permanent member of the UN Security Council by January 1 next year, if everything goes according to a timetable now being put together at the UN headquarters here.

Sixty to 70 per cent of the UN’s membership favours a formula which will bring India — along with significant other countries — into the council as a permanent member, UN diplomats said at the conclusion of a special General Assembly discussion.

A permanent seat for India will be the culmination of nearly 15 years of efforts to change the structure of the council.

The next milestone in reforming the council will be in about three weeks, when UN secretary-general Kofi Annan will propose to members of the world body his restructuring plan.

To enable Annan to make his recommendations, a “high-level panel on threats, challenges and change”, gave its opinion to him on December 2 last year.

Lieutenant General Satish Nambiar, the former deputy chief of army staff, was a member of the panel. It proposed two formulas for restructuring the council. “Plan A” calls for increasing the number of permanent members by six and that of non-permanent members by three.

“Plan B” envisages creating eight semi-permanent seats, to be filled by election by the General Assembly every four years, and one non-permanent seat.

In both cases, the total number of members will increase by nine to 24. Veto power will not be granted to the new members.

Lobbying for the reform will reach its peak in July in Perthshire, Scotland, during the next summit of the Group of Eight (G8) industrialised countries.

Japan and Germany are working overtime to get G8 approval for expanding the council: they reckon that without a G8 consensus, any attempt to reform the UN will come a cropper.

According to diplomats at the UN headquarters here, Japan will present a resolution to the General Assembly in September for changes to the UN charter.

The resolution, according to present plans, will be co-sponsored by India, Germany and Brazil. All three countries are aspirants to permanent seats and formed an alliance during the General Assembly last year to pursue this goal together.

India’s ambassador to the UN, Nirupam Sen, said in his statement during an informal General Assembly meeting, convened here a few weeks ago: “Expansion of the permanent together with the non-permanent membership is not a matter of arithmetical sophistry, but of… clear issues for the majority of the vulnerable and developing world”.

Throughout the General Assembly discussions, the number of countries which supported Plan B remained at a steady 10 among the UN’s 191 members.

The remaining 181 governments categorically opposed that plan. Of these, 60 to 70 per cent favoured Plan A, which would see India slide into a permanent seat in the council.

Two-thirds of the General Assembly — 128 countries in all — will have to support the proposed Japanese resolution for this to happen.

This is not only possible, but likely, as Singapore demonstrated when the General Assembly met to discuss the report of the panel.

Before the meeting, Singapore was in favour of Plan B, but in the General Assembly, it changed its view and launched a blistering attack on the idea of semi-permanent membership.

In recent weeks, India and Singapore have been in regular talks on the course of UN reform. Singapore is a member of the “coffee club” at the UN, a group of states opposed to the expansion of permanent seats in the council. Therefore, its changed stand on Plan B represents a setback for the club.

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Re: India will become a permanent member of the UN Security Council by January 1 2006

Rather than a threat to Pakistan, India's joining the Sec Con will be good for the region. Our world needs more powers than just US and Europe. In fact, big countries like Indonesia and Brazil need to be included as well.

Everytime I come into Cafe
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Re: India will become a permanent member of the UN Security Council by January 1 2006

High time. Stoopid eurogoras have been enjoying disproportionate influence. Then all these little tadpole states that run around with their banana loaded nuke pistolas and generalissamos will learn to respect the people of the world

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Re: India will become a permanent member of the UN Security Council by January 1 2006

installment of all BRIC natons into UN permanency is a must. apart from them, i don't see a pressing need for any other nation to be a permanent member for a long time.

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Re: India will become a permanent member of the UN Security Council by January 1 2006

the Security council's permanent seats need to be disbanded....

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Re: India will become a permanent member of the UN Security Council by January 1 2006

finally!........it was about time i would say....yes, i thought india's stance on the no seat without veto was not really in our best interest....first lets get in then proceed from there...as for pakistan...i would say it should not see it as a threat....finally a representative from our region S.E that is .....ah may january1, 2006 make us proud....

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Re: India will become a permanent member of the UN Security Council by January 1 2006

i think the UN should be disbanded now. look at how they've been irrelevant and impotent in enforcing their own resolutions in kashmir, iraq, palestine waghera waghera.

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Re: India will become a permanent member of the UN Security Council by January 1 2006

That would be a black day in the history of our times..

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Re: India will become a permanent member of the UN Security Council by January 1 2006

Whether the UN exists or not, since time immemorial, powerful nations have always had their cliques or groups to sit and decide the fate of the rest of the world. Call it UN, NATO, G-8 - whatever. It is only a matter of time before India, Japan, Germany and Brazil are invited into the party - whatever it's called.

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Re: India will become a permanent member of the UN Security Council by January 1 2006

The world in the next 25 yrs will be run by US, CHina, India, Russia and Brazil...meanwhile the ummah will be deciding whether to shave on tuesday or not and the Europeans will be trying to figure out whether the new EU national anthem will be in French, polish, german or turkish. :)

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Re: India will become a permanent member of the UN Security Council by January 1 2006

No Matsui the world in the next 25 yrs will be run with Oil, Oil comes from the Ummah, so Ummah aint going nowhere. I agree about the PU...err EU.

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Re: India will become a permanent member of the UN Security Council by January 1 2006

The world is run with oil today, how is that helping ummah?

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Re: India will become a permanent member of the UN Security Council by January 1 2006

Oil is a commodity…buyers control the market. what will the ummah do..eat and drink the oil?

also, oil doesn’t help, 90% of the ummah. .. :slight_smile:

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Re: India will become a permanent member of the UN Security Council by January 1 2006

Indonesian and Indian Muslims are not part of the ummah

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Re: India will become a permanent member of the UN Security Council by January 1 2006

.

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Re: India will become a permanent member of the UN Security Council by January 1 2006

Oil is the curse of the Ummah. As long as there is oil wealth, the Ummah will look to a few rich shieks to solve problems..

As far as India joining the SC? Hard to ignore a billion people, and an economy with such potential!. Once India ceased to be a Soviet proxy state, they unleashed a lot of creativity and business energy. India is Taiwan and Singapore writ large.

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Re: India will become a permanent member of the UN Security Council by January 1 2006

Masterly inaction as policy

By Irfan Husain

ONE would have thought that with so many retired diplomats now offering their unsolicited advice to the government through newspaper columns, our foreign policy would be a little more creative.

As New Yorkers say, “Fugedaboutit!” The foreign office continues to react to events in its old, predictable fashion. Take the current flurry of diplomatic activity over the proposed expansion of the UN Security Council as an example of knee-jerk reaction.

Just because India is one of the four states currently lobbying for inclusion as a permanent member of the Council, Pakistan is doing everything in its power to block the change. Its diplomats are begging the governments of the countries they are accredited to not to support the proposal. We have no objections to Brazil, Japan or Germany joining the club, but India’s entry is anathema to us.

And why is this? Because despite recent peace moves, we are locked in a zero-sum game with our neighbour in which any gain for India translates into an equivalent loss for us. This puerile, no-win situation extends from sports to defence to diplomacy.

Let us examine what would happen to our interests if India were to join the Security Council. Precisely nothing. The Security Council resolutions on Kashmir would remain on the books, for whatever that’s worth. And since the SC has been unable to enforce these resolutions in over five decades, India’s presence is hardly likely to damage our claim. The Kashmir problem will still have to be resolved bilaterally.

If anything, India might have a stronger incentive to sort out the problem because it might find a local conflict embarrassing in its capacity as a permanent member. Not that this is a sure thing: Chechnya doesn’t seem to embarrass Russia, just as the war in Iraq has hardly caused any blushes in Washington.

My point is that the foreign office has worked itself into a frenzy for no good reason. All India’s admission to the Security Council would do is to confirm its position as a major power. We may not like it, but by any standard, our neighbour is in the big league. If its economy continues to grow at the current rate, it is expected to be the third biggest after the United States and China by the middle of this century. Its nuclear status and its conventional military power certainly put it ahead of Japan, Brazil and Germany as a contender for a permanent Council seat. And with well over a billion people, it is now the second most populous country in the world.

None of this is to suggest that India has no problems. Far from it. Its population continues to grow at a pace which will see it overtake China soon. Huge numbers of its people are below the poverty line. Its slow, creaking bureaucracy continues to hold the economy back. And its social and political problems are enormously difficult to overcome. Nevertheless, its claim to permanent membership in the Security Council cannot be ignored.

For the Pakistani establishment, these are unpalatable facts, but we need to face reality, unpleasant though it may be. For far too long, Pakistan has insisted on being treated at par with India. But with India now poised at an economic take-off while we still grapple unsuccessfully with problems of religious extremism and intolerance, our economy dependent on foreign aid, other countries take a more pragmatic view.

There is a school of thought which holds the view that since the United Nations has been unable to stop wars, it is therefore irrelevant. But just think how much worse things would have been without its existence. For every armed conflict that has broken out, at least one has been prevented. Even if the UN is no more than a debating society, it is better to talk a disagreement to death than fight over it.

At the end of the day, the UN is what its members have fashioned it to be, no more and no less. The permanent members of the Security Council obviously have more clout than others, but its coercive powers are very limited. The fear in Pakistan is that India would use its position to undermine us in some way. But this apprehension is not supported by our experience of the international body thus far.

So what should we do if we do not oppose India’s admission? How about supporting it? There has been much talk of confidence building measures (CBMs) between the two rivals. If we were to discuss the quid pro quo for our support behind the scenes, our gesture would help promote goodwill that could be expended to help resolve the Kashmir problem.

I agree that actually supporting the Indian bid would be difficult to sell to our hawks. The next option would be neither to oppose nor support it. After all, other states are already against the expansion proposal. China is against Japan’s inclusion, just as Italy is against Germany’s. Our joining this ‘coffee club’ as the opponents of expansion are known to be irrelevant. If expansion does take place, our opposition simply leaves us with an egg on our face.

And if it doesn’t, we will not be able to take any credit. The fact that Bush has linked expansion with UN reforms probably puts the proposal on hold for the time being. Thus, we did not have to run around like a headless chicken in the first place.

As it is, the whole world is so sick of the Indo-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir that our lobbying is pretty ineffective. Nobody wants to offend India just to please Pakistan. Over the years, we have seen support for our Kashmir policy seep away. Now even China advises us to sort it out with India bilaterally.

At the core of this zero-sum game is our psychological inability to face facts where our neighbour is concerned. Our insistence on being treated as India’s equal at international forums is now wearing thin with the rest of the world. Then there is the contradiction inherent in wishing to improve relations with India while actively trying to block its bid.

We would be far better off if we tried to solve our own problems rather than dabbling in matters we have no control over. In fact, if we focused on cleaning up the mess within Pakistan rather than getting bogged down in global issues, we might one day have greater credibility. After all, who needs advice from a country with a tottering economy, a largely illiterate population, a violent society, and a dysfunctional political system?

http://www.dawn.com/weekly/mazdak/mazdak.htm