New Delhi: The West is responsible for many problems of the world today, Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar said Thursday, but also took a subtle jab at China for being the “biggest” opponent of reforms in the UN Security Council.
At a session of the Raisina Dialogue – India’s annual multilateral conference of geopolitics and geoeconomics – Jaishankar said: “A lot of the world’s problems today are a creation of the West but it is also true that the biggest opposer of the UN Security Council reform today is not a Western country.”
Last May, Wang Yi, director of China’s Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs, maintained Beijing’s unyielding stance on UNSC reforms and expansion.
While he argued that developing countries needed more representation in international forums, Yi stopped short of directly commenting on countries like India, Brazil and others, who have actively been demanding a change.
There are five permanent members in the UNSC with veto powers — China, France, Russia, the UK and the US. The remaining 10 in the council are non-permanent members who enjoy rotational two-year terms.
Jaishankar added there were approximately 50 members when the UN had started. “We have four times the members (now). So it’s a common sense proposition that you can’t continue the same way,” he said.
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Kashmir aggression issue became one of ‘accession’
Asked if countries would always act in their own interests, the Indian foreign minister said that had long been the traditional modus operandi of countries, offering the example of Kashmir on the international stage.
“In our first year of independence, we put our trust in multilateralism and took Kashmir’s ‘aggression’ issue to the UN… others made it into an ‘accession’ issue. They did it for geopolitical reasons,” he said.
“The fact is, if you say, are people playing multilateralism? They always have. We’ve grown up,” he added.
(Edited by Tikli Basu)
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We may have arrived on different ships, but we are all in the same boat now. Beyond a point, stirring the settled sediment of history, recent or more distant, does not help. There are shared challenges like climate change and pandemics, also a tepid global economy, that require multinational cooperation. Not what is visible in Ukraine and Gaza. India should be part of the solutions. Occasionally a little humble, even if that is not the zeitgeist.