Did India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, make a historic error by turning down an offer made, first, by the United States in 1950 and then, in 1955, by the Soviet Union to become a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC)?&nbsp;

Were these offers made at all? And if so, were they merely feelers, not a serious reflection of intent by the two superpowers at the beginning of the Cold War?

Two schools of thought have emerged. The first holds that the US and the USSR merely broached the subject of a permanent UNSC seat for India. The offer was a feeler. Nehru’s sister Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, then India’s representative at the UN, was firmly against India “usurping” China’s claim to a permanent seat. Nehru agreed with her assessment. China, he wrote to her, is a great nation and deserves permanent membership of the UNSC.&nbsp;

Both he and his sister, highly influential in the US and at the UN, felt that India must be a neutral party in the Cold War. By accepting the offer of a permanent seat in the UNSC, however informal the offer was, the two Nehru siblings felt India would need to take sides in international crises like the Korean War. That would compromise India’s position as a founder of the non-aligned movement (NAM).

The second school of thought holds a diametrically opposite point of view. India misread the situation. It dismissed Washington’s overtures in 1950 when the US wanted to contain the influence of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) which had in 1949 won a civil war against Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalists who fled to Taiwan and, as the Republic of China (ROC), represented the PRC at the UN from 1949 to 1971. The Soviets in 1955 too wanted India as a permanent member of the UNSC but Nehru again brushed off the offer as not being a serious one.&nbsp;

This, the second school of thought holds, amounted to compounding the earlier historic error of rejecting Washington’s offer of a UNSC seat in 1950 for which India, nearly 70 years later, is paying a heavy price.

Which of the two schools of thought has greater merit? For the answer, turn to original sources. In painstaking research, Anton Harder, a PhD scholar specialising in Sino-India relations, wrote in 2015: “The issue of India’s right to a seat on the UNSC has centred on Nehru not seizing several alleged opportunities for India to join the UNSC as a permanent member in the 1950s. The question, however, goes beyond Nehru’s reputation, as it provides rare insights into India’s relations with the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) at the beginning of the Cold War.

“The 1955 offer from the Soviets is well-documented, although perhaps not widely known. The 1955 incident was publicly discussed in 2002 in print by AG Noorani, a major scholar of modern Indian history and politics. However, new evidence of an even earlier offer — by the US in August 1950 — to assist India in assuming a permanent seat at the UNSC has recently emerged, adding substantially to what Noorani earlier wrote. Nehru’s rejection of the US offer underlined the consistency of his conviction that the PRC’s legitimate interests must be acknowledged in order to reduce international tensions. Integrating the PRC into the international community by conceding its right to the Chinese seat at the Security Council was, in fact, a central pillar of Nehru’s foreign policy.

“The documents critical to answering these questions are stowed away in the Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit papers held at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML). The importance of Pandit’s papers lies in her relationship with her brother Jawaharlal Nehru. The Pandit papers have not been deployed thus far in studies focused on India’s relationship with China. In late August 1950, Pandit wrote to her brother from Washington, DC, where she was then posted as India’s ambassador to the United States: ‘One matter that is being cooked up in the State Department should be known to you. This is the unseating of China as a Permanent Member in the Security Council and of India being put in her place.’

“Nehru’s response within the week was unequivocal: ‘In your letter, you mention that the State Department is trying to unseat China as a Permanent Member of the Security Council and to put India in her place. So far as we are concerned, we are not going to countenance it. That would be bad from every point of view. It would be a clear affront to China and it would mean some kind of a break between us and China.’”

The Indian establishment had quickly closed ranks around Nehru’s controversial historic decision. K Shankar Bajpai, former secretary in the MEA and ambassador to the US and China, told The Print last week: &nbsp;“It has become a fashion to blame Nehru for everything. To think that India could have taken China’s seat is utter nonsense.”

While the geopolitical imperatives of the 1950s cannot be viewed through a contemporary prism, Nehru’s decision to cede veto-carrying membership of the UNSC to China has led, decades later, to aggressive Chinese behaviour, including supporting Pakistan based Jaish-e-Mohammed founder Masood Azhar at the UNSC. Nehru, were he alive, would be mortified. 
&nbsp;

(This article was originally published on The DNA. Read the <a href="https://www.dnaindia.com/analysis/column-nehru-china-and-the-unsc-2733960">original article)</a>

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above are the personal views of the author and do not reflect the views of ZMCL.)

Did India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, make a historic error by turning down an offer made, first, by the United States in 1950 and then, in 1955, by the Soviet Union to become a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC)?

Did India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, make a historic error by turning down an offer made, first, by the United States in 1950 and then, in 1955, by the Soviet Union to become a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC)? Were these offers made at all? And if so, were they merely feelers, not a serious reflection of intent by the two superpowers at the beginning of the Cold War? Two schools of thought have emerged. The first holds that the US and the USSR merely broached the subject of a permanent UNSC seat for India. The offer was a feeler. Nehru’s sister Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, then India’s representative at the UN, was firmly against India “usurping” China’s claim to a permanent seat. Nehru agreed with her assessment. China, he wrote to her, is a great nation and deserves permanent membership of the UNSC. Both he and his sister, highly influential in the US and at the UN, felt that India must be a neutral party in the Cold War. By accepting the offer of a permanent seat in the UNSC, however informal the offer was, the two Nehru siblings felt India would need to take sides in international crises like the Korean War. That would compromise India’s position as a founder of the non-aligned movement (NAM). The second school of thought holds a diametrically opposite point of view. India misread the situation. It dismissed Washington’s overtures in 1950 when the US wanted to contain the influence of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) which had in 1949 won a civil war against Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalists who fled to Taiwan and, as the Republic of China (ROC), represented the PRC at the UN from 1949 to 1971. The Soviets in 1955 too wanted India as a permanent member of the UNSC but Nehru again brushed off the offer as not being a serious one. This, the second school of thought holds, amounted to compounding the earlier historic error of rejecting Washington’s offer of a UNSC seat in 1950 for which India, nearly 70 years later, is paying a heavy price. Which of the two schools of thought has greater merit? For the answer, turn to original sources. In painstaking research, Anton Harder, a PhD scholar specialising in Sino-India relations, wrote in 2015: “The issue of India’s right to a seat on the UNSC has centred on Nehru not seizing several alleged opportunities for India to join the UNSC as a permanent member in the 1950s. The question, however, goes beyond Nehru’s reputation, as it provides rare insights into India’s relations with the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) at the beginning of the Cold War. “The 1955 offer from the Soviets is well-documented, although perhaps not widely known. The 1955 incident was publicly discussed in 2002 in print by AG Noorani, a major scholar of modern Indian history and politics. However, new evidence of an even earlier offer — by the US in August 1950 — to assist India in assuming a permanent seat at the UNSC has recently emerged, adding substantially to what Noorani earlier wrote. Nehru’s rejection of the US offer underlined the consistency of his conviction that the PRC’s legitimate interests must be acknowledged in order to reduce international tensions. Integrating the PRC into the international community by conceding its right to the Chinese seat at the Security Council was, in fact, a central pillar of Nehru’s foreign policy. “The documents critical to answering these questions are stowed away in the Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit papers held at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML). The importance of Pandit’s papers lies in her relationship with her brother Jawaharlal Nehru. The Pandit papers have not been deployed thus far in studies focused on India’s relationship with China. In late August 1950, Pandit wrote to her brother from Washington, DC, where she was then posted as India’s ambassador to the United States: ‘One matter that is being cooked up in the State Department should be known to you. This is the unseating of China as a Permanent Member in the Security Council and of India being put in her place.’ “Nehru’s response within the week was unequivocal: ‘In your letter, you mention that the State Department is trying to unseat China as a Permanent Member of the Security Council and to put India in her place. So far as we are concerned, we are not going to countenance it. That would be bad from every point of view. It would be a clear affront to China and it would mean some kind of a break between us and China.’” The Indian establishment had quickly closed ranks around Nehru’s controversial historic decision. K Shankar Bajpai, former secretary in the MEA and ambassador to the US and China, told The Print last week: “It has become a fashion to blame Nehru for everything. To think that India could have taken China’s seat is utter nonsense.” While the geopolitical imperatives of the 1950s cannot be viewed through a contemporary prism, Nehru’s decision to cede veto-carrying membership of the UNSC to China has led, decades later, to aggressive Chinese behaviour, including supporting Pakistan based Jaish-e-Mohammed founder Masood Azhar at the UNSC. Nehru, were he alive, would be mortified. (This article was originally published on The DNA. Read the original article) (Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above are the personal views of the author and do not reflect the views of ZMCL.)

Jawaharlal Nehru's decision to 'favour China' for UNSC seat led to Chinese aggressive behaviour

The slow-moving UN Security Council reform is a "very divisive" and "contentious" issue and all the member&nbsp;states have to walk the extra mile as they work on divergences and commonalities to ensure the process does not become a "zero-sum game", General Assembly President Maria Fernanda Espinosa has said.

India has been at the forefront of efforts at the UN to push for urgent long-pending reform of the Security Council, emphasising that it rightly deserves a place at the UN high table as a permanent member.

The Security Council reform "is very much a member State-driven process. My role as President is to accompany, to lead, to make sure that the process continues, to make sure that it is inclusive and that it is transparent," Espinosa said at a press briefing here on Friday.

She was responding to a question by PTI on the long-pending reform of the powerful 15-nation UN organ, with little progress 10 years after the Inter-Governmental Negotiations (IGN) began.

"It is not an easy issue. I want to be very open and frank with you. It is very divisive, it is contentious," she said.

Espinosa had appointed Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Luxembourg to the UN Christian Braun and Permanent Representative of the United Arab Emirates to the UN Lana Nusseibeh as Co-Chairs of the Intergovernmental Negotiations on UN Security Council reform.

She described the two co-chairs as "excellent" and lauded them for putting a lot of effort and working, engaging with all member States in "trying to pull together the different positions, trying to look at the commonalities to see how we can tackle the issue in order to avoid the zero-sum game".

In January this year, India's Permanent Representative to the UN Ambassador Syed Akbaruddin said at an informal meeting of the Plenary on the Intergovernmental negotiations on the question of increase in the membership of the Security Council that no process known to UN members had traversed "winding pathways" in the manner as the Security Council reform process had.

"In terms of length, it is unparalleled. In terms of inertia too, it has no peer," Akbaruddin had said, noting that it has been an "arduous journey" given that it has been more than 10 years since the start of the IGN process in 2008.

Espinosa acknowledged that people were getting "impatient" after 10 years of the IGN but said "this is the process we have and I think that we have to make sure that the process continues, that all member States engage and we pull a little bit, we push and push and walk the extra mile".

She, however, did not give a direct reply to a question on when the Council will get reformed and on her expectations from countries such as India, Germany and Japan seeking to become the permanent members of the Council.

"Sometimes, perhaps I shouldn't be saying this because I'm supposed to be neutral, but sometimes we see the Security Council reform as an either/or and a black and white issue but there are so many things that we can do to improve the Security Council working methods and we can do it now without any major changes," she said.

Espinosa said she had a "lot of hope" on what the 10 elected members of the Council were doing.

"I think that they (elected 10 members) are de-facto making some meaningful changes in improving the working methods and the transparency of the Security Council," she said.

Akbaruddin said last week that while the world was not what it was when the reform process began, the objections to moving forward remain the same.

"While the global challenges of the 21st century have multiplied, we remain divided even about the process to adopt in order to move forward," he had said.

Akbaruddin also said that on the issue of 'Categories of Membership', a total of 113 Member States, out of 122 who submitted their positions in the Framework Document, support the expansion in both the permanent and non-permanent membership categories of the Council.

France, which assumed the rotating presidency of the Council in March, has reiterated its support for India, Germany and Japan as permanent members of an expanded Council, saying enlargement of the powerful UN organ in both permanent and non-permanent categories is the "first crucial part" towards the UNSC reform.&nbsp;

France has maintained that if the crises of recent times have confirmed the centrality of the UN, they have also reinforced the need to make the organisation more effective and more representative of the current balances in the world.

"That is why France pushes for the expansion of the Security Council by supporting the accession to a permanent seat of Germany, Brazil, India, Japan, as well as a greater presence of African countries," according to the Permanent Mission of France.&nbsp;

The slow-moving UN Security Council reform is a "very divisive" and "contentious" issue and all the member states have to walk the extra mile as they work on divergences and commonalities to ensure the process does not become a "zero-sum game", General Assembly President Maria Fernanda Espinosa has said.

The slow-moving UN Security Council reform is a "very divisive" and "contentious" issue and all the member states have to walk the extra mile as they work on divergences and commonalities to ensure the process does not become a "zero-sum game", General Assembly President Maria Fernanda Espinosa has said. India has been at the forefront of efforts at the UN to push for urgent long-pending reform of the Security Council, emphasising that it rightly deserves a place at the UN high table as a permanent member. The Security Council reform "is very much a member State-driven process. My role as President is to accompany, to lead, to make sure that the process continues, to make sure that it is inclusive and that it is transparent," Espinosa said at a press briefing here on Friday. She was responding to a question by PTI on the long-pending reform of the powerful 15-nation UN organ, with little progress 10 years after the Inter-Governmental Negotiations (IGN) began. "It is not an easy issue. I want to be very open and frank with you. It is very divisive, it is contentious," she said. Espinosa had appointed Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Luxembourg to the UN Christian Braun and Permanent Representative of the United Arab Emirates to the UN Lana Nusseibeh as Co-Chairs of the Intergovernmental Negotiations on UN Security Council reform. She described the two co-chairs as "excellent" and lauded them for putting a lot of effort and working, engaging with all member States in "trying to pull together the different positions, trying to look at the commonalities to see how we can tackle the issue in order to avoid the zero-sum game". In January this year, India's Permanent Representative to the UN Ambassador Syed Akbaruddin said at an informal meeting of the Plenary on the Intergovernmental negotiations on the question of increase in the membership of the Security Council that no process known to UN members had traversed "winding pathways" in the manner as the Security Council reform process had. "In terms of length, it is unparalleled. In terms of inertia too, it has no peer," Akbaruddin had said, noting that it has been an "arduous journey" given that it has been more than 10 years since the start of the IGN process in 2008. Espinosa acknowledged that people were getting "impatient" after 10 years of the IGN but said "this is the process we have and I think that we have to make sure that the process continues, that all member States engage and we pull a little bit, we push and push and walk the extra mile". She, however, did not give a direct reply to a question on when the Council will get reformed and on her expectations from countries such as India, Germany and Japan seeking to become the permanent members of the Council. "Sometimes, perhaps I shouldn't be saying this because I'm supposed to be neutral, but sometimes we see the Security Council reform as an either/or and a black and white issue but there are so many things that we can do to improve the Security Council working methods and we can do it now without any major changes," she said. Espinosa said she had a "lot of hope" on what the 10 elected members of the Council were doing. "I think that they (elected 10 members) are de-facto making some meaningful changes in improving the working methods and the transparency of the Security Council," she said. Akbaruddin said last week that while the world was not what it was when the reform process began, the objections to moving forward remain the same. "While the global challenges of the 21st century have multiplied, we remain divided even about the process to adopt in order to move forward," he had said. Akbaruddin also said that on the issue of 'Categories of Membership', a total of 113 Member States, out of 122 who submitted their positions in the Framework Document, support the expansion in both the permanent and non-permanent membership categories of the Council. France, which assumed the rotating presidency of the Council in March, has reiterated its support for India, Germany and Japan as permanent members of an expanded Council, saying enlargement of the powerful UN organ in both permanent and non-permanent categories is the "first crucial part" towards the UNSC reform. France has maintained that if the crises of recent times have confirmed the centrality of the UN, they have also reinforced the need to make the organisation more effective and more representative of the current balances in the world. "That is why France pushes for the expansion of the Security Council by supporting the accession to a permanent seat of Germany, Brazil, India, Japan, as well as a greater presence of African countries," according to the Permanent Mission of France.

UN Security Council reform process 'contentious' issue: General Assembly president

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Jawaharlal Nehru's decision to 'favour China' for UNSC seat led to Chinese aggressive behaviour

UN Security Council reform process 'contentious' issue: General Assembly president