UN

Story hook

It is 22 September 2024, UN Headquarters, New York. Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar rises to address the 79th UN General Assembly. His opening line is sharper than usual: "The United Nations Security Council, frozen in 1945, is an anachronism that no longer reflects the world it claims to govern. India will continue to lead the call for reform — not for itself, but for the legitimacy of the multilateral order." Behind him sits the gilded horseshoe table — the 15-seat Security Council with 5 permanent members (P5) holding vetoes that were last expanded in 1965 when non-permanent seats were raised from 6 to 10. Since then, the world has added 140+ states, watched the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of China, the Iraq invasion, the Syria gridlock, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine 2022 — every test the Council has failed.

A floor below, in the General Assembly hall, another vote is being prepared on the Pact for the Future, the Secretary-General António Guterres's flagship reform document for the Summit of the Future held the previous day. India, as one of the four co-facilitators of the G4 (India-Germany-Japan-Brazil) reform push, is again pressing the same demand it has made since the Razali Plan of 1997: permanent membership with veto for the world's largest democracy, the world's most populous nation, the 5th-largest economy, and the largest troop-contributor to UN peacekeeping in 70+ years.

UPSC examiners return to this topic year after year because the UN sits at the heart of India's foreign-policy identity — Nehru's "moral champion of multilateralism" has hardened into Modi-Jaishankar's "demanding reformist outsider".

Why this matters for UPSC

UN reform is asked in Mains GS-II nearly every year ("Examine India's case for permanent UNSC membership"), and Prelims testing covers G4, L.69, Uniting for Consensus (UfC), ECOSOC functional commissions, ICJ basics, and India's tenure as non-permanent UNSC member (8 times, last 2021-22). Interview boards probe the politics of reform (why it has stalled), the P5 vetos, and India's pivot from "moral suasion" to "reform or legitimacy-loss".