The accepted interlinkage between peace, security, and development in Agenda 2030 is now the framework for India’s call for “reformed multilateralism”, which seeks to make the UN responsive and effective in implementing Agenda 2030. At the heart of “reformed multilateralism” is the reform of the UNSC.
The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres released a significant report recently. titled “”Sustainable Development Goals Report 2021″, it gives a worrying overall picture of the main preoccupation of the UN today, which is the implementation of Agenda 2030 on Sustainable Development by ensuring a supportive environment of peace, security, and development. The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has been especially harsh on some of the objectives of the UN’s Agenda 2030 on sustainable development, the overarching objective of which is the eradication of poverty worldwide by 2030. Since the 1972 first UN Conference on the Environment, India has steadfastly pursued this objective through the UN, based on her vision that “poverty is the biggest polluter”.
This Report is important for India. When India joined 50 other countries 76 years ago in June 1945 to negotiate and establish the UN, her primary concern was how the UN would support her rapid socio-economic transformation. The Cold War, launched on 5 March 1946 with British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill’s seminal “Iron Curtain” speech at Fulton, Missouri in the United States, augured ill for a consolidated process within the UN to enable this objective, dividing the unity of the original founding members of the UN.
As Vijayalakshmi Pandit, the leader of Independent India’s delegation to the UN General Assembly said on 17 September 1947, “We cannot eat an ideology; we cannot brandish an ideology and feel that we are clothed and housed. Food, clothing, shelter, education, medical services‐these are the things we need. We know that we can only obtain them by our joint efforts as a people, and with the help and co‐ operation of those who are in more fortunate circumstances than ourselves.”
The role of India in spearheading the historic movement to democratize international relations by seeking equal participation of all its member-states is widely acknowledged. This enabled the UN to unanimously adopt its Decolonization Resolution in December 1960. Scores of newly independent former colonial countries joined the UN General Assembly without their applications to join being vetoed by the permanent members of the UN Security Council (UNSC).
In retrospect, the significance of the Decolonization Resolution lies in consolidating the formation of the Group of 77 (G-77) developing country grouping in 1964 (of which India was the first Chairman). The UN General Assembly created the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in 1965 to catalyze the demands of the G-77 for accelerated socio-economic development. Today, the G-77 consists of 134 members out of the 193 member-states represented in the UN General Assembly.
The convergence of the socio-economic development goals of the UN with the priority for environmental protection resulted in the mandate for sustainable development given by the UN’s 1992 “Earth Summit” held in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. This was the first watershed moment for reorienting the UN after the end of the Cold War in 1989. India joined other developing countries in discussing and negotiating the contours of sustainable development, which were adopted by the 2012 Summit held again at Rio de Janeiro and became the mandate for Agenda 2030 on Sustainable Development adopted by world leaders (including Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India) in September 2015.
The accepted interlinkage between peace, security, and development in Agenda 2030 is now the framework for India’s call for “reformed multilateralism”, which seeks to make the UN responsive and effective in implementing Agenda 2030. At the heart of “reformed multilateralism” is the reform of the UNSC. In 2005, world leaders (including those representing all the five permanent members of the UNSC or P5) had agreed to UNSC reform to “make it more broadly representative, efficient and transparent and thus to further enhance its effectiveness and the legitimacy and implementation of its decisions”.
At the very first session of the UN General Assembly on 18 January 1946, Sir Ramaswami Mudaliar, representing India, had said that India, along with several other UN member-states, had opposed the provision of the veto power of the five self-selected P5 of the UN Security Council. However, the clear commitment in the Charter itself was that “at the end of the ten years’ period when we re‐examine the Charter, there will be unanimity again, and that this United Nations Charter will not require all the safeguards which big nations sometimes claim and small nations so unwillingly give.”
This review provision contained in Article 109 of the Charter was never implemented, leading to the ineffectiveness of the UN Security Council and the UN itself. India’s call for “reformed multilateralism” addresses this issue squarely.
How is the issue of UNSC reform relevant to the functioning of the UN today? Leading commentators in the P5 countries continue to advocate persevering with an outdated and increasingly irrelevant UNSC which preserves the status quo of 1945, when the world was dominated by colonial powers. Yet, as the ongoing crises in Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America demonstrate, the impact of an ineffective UNSC is felt most directly on the implementation of Agenda 2030 on sustainable development. This represents a “wake-up call” for the UN.
The UN’s Sustainable Development Report 2021 highlights that between 119-124 million people were pushed back into extreme poverty in 2020 due to the pandemic. An additional 70-161 million people experienced hunger in 2020 due to the pandemic, which has disrupted essential health services globally, aggravating mitigation measures such as universal vaccination. 20 years of educational gains have been wiped out by the pandemic, with an additional 110 million children in grades 1 through 8 falling below minimum reading proficiency levels in 2020. The pandemic has aggravated the burden of unpaid domestic or care work, taking women out of the labor force. It has set back infrastructural development to meet the goals of sanitation and clean water, with 129 countries not on track today to reach this objective by 2030. The pandemic has obstructed 2.6 billion people from moving towards the renewable energy targets of Agenda 2030, while causing a loss of 255 million full-time jobs and impacting on 1.6 billion “informal economy” workers. Exploitation of child labor for the first time in two decades increased to 160 million in 2020. Due to the pandemic global manufacturing production fell by 6.8% in 2020, while the Gini gauge of economic inequality in emerging markets and developing economies increased by 6%. The worst impact of the pandemic has been felt by 1 billion slum dwellers in Asia and Africa. In areas of Agenda 2030 dealing with environmental goals, the picture is equally dire, with global warming on the rise, and increasing threats to endangered species and the degradation of natural resources. Even Foreign Direct Investment dropped by up to 40% from $1.5 trillion in 2019 to $1 trillion in 2020.
This represents a “wake-up call” for the UN 75 years after its founding in 1945. Unless it urgently responds to the global crisis by reforming itself, the first three words of the UN Charter, “we the peoples,” will remain meaningless.
The author is a former Ambassador and Permanent Representative of India to the United Nations.
Ambassador Asoke Mukerji served for over 37 years in India’s Foreign Service, retiring in December 2015 as Ambassador and Permanent Representative of India to the UN in New York. He is a member of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, London, and a Distinguished Fellow at India’s oldest think-tank, the United Service Institution (USI) of India and at the Vivekananda International Foundation, New Delhi. Since 2019 he is on the faculty of the Geneva-based Diplo Foundation teaching diplomacy. He was awarded a Doctor of Civil Laws (honoris causa) degree by the University of East Anglia (UK) in July 2018 for his contributions to diplomacy. He has authored 7 books, of which the first copy of “India and the United Nations 1945-2015: a Photo Journey” was presented by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon in New York in September 2015.
Ambassador Mukerji can be reached at 1955pram@gmail.com