Multilateralism and India during 2014-2024

Between 2014 and 2024, India has navigated the multilateral world to ensure a supportive external environment of peace, security, and stability to accelerate the transformation underway in India. The fact that India is both a founder-member of multilateral institutions established after 1945, and a stakeholder in the equitable and effective functioning of these institutions, makes the multilateral system of direct interest to India. Over the past decade, multilateralism has veered between the spectrum of successful international cooperation and an emerging fragmentation of such cooperation. India has participated actively in contributing to the successes, and in mobilizing support for responding to the challenges confronting multilateralism today.

India’s proposal at the annual UN General Assembly (UNGA) high-level meeting on 27 September 2014 to declare the International Yoga Day (IYD)^[1] on 21 June every year is a watershed in India’s multilateral diplomacy. It illustrates how the core principle of international cooperation had the “power to bring the entire humankind together”.^[2] The decision to implement India’s proposal through a UNGA resolution for an IYD was unanimous. Of the UNGA’s 193 member-states, 177 became its co-sponsors within a record time of 75 days on 11 December 2014.

The IYD resolution brought an Asian idea and practice to implement the UN Charter’s declared objectives of a harmonious and prosperous world. With its focus on promoting global health and the environment, the IYD played a major role in the unanimous adoption of Agenda 2030 with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on 25 September 2015.

Agenda 2030 symbolized the successful outcome of a long journey to bring the priorities of developing countries for accelerated socio-economic growth into the multilateral agenda. It is anchored in the “right to development”, recognized by the UNGA in 1986 as an “inalienable human right”. Agenda 2030 acknowledges the “interlinkages that define our lives” in the social, economic, and environmental areas, and makes SDG 1 on eradication of poverty its overarching goal.^[3]

India has aligned its national development objectives with Agenda 2030, creating a quantifiable framework to measure the transformation of India.^[4] The increasing contribution of India’s international trade, which contributes almost half of India’s GDP today,^[5] is an important indicator of the impact of these interlinkages as India becomes a $5 trillion economy, among the top five in the world.

On the margins of the UN Conference on Climate Change in Paris in November 2015, India proposed the creation of a new international treaty-based organization to harness the immense potential of solar energy as part of the global movement towards using renewable energy for sustainable development. This “climate action” initiative from a developing country resulted in the establishment of the International Solar Alliance (ISA) of over 120 countries in Gurugram in 2018. The ISA is the first major multilateral organization to be headquartered in India after India’s independence.

In December 2015, at the UNGA High-level Review of the Tunis Agenda on using information and communication technologies (ICT) to bridge existing divides for the benefit of mankind, India shared its experience of using ICTs in the Digital India platform to empower and accelerate equitable sustainable development. By 2020, more than 400 million individual Indian citizens had been enabled to participate in a framework of inclusive and equitable economic growth using a convergence of biometrics, telecoms, and financial sector technologies.^[6]

At the G20 Summit held in New Delhi on 9-10 September 2023, India proposed to share its Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) to “enable delivery of services at societal scale” through global interoperability. The G20 unanimously welcomed “India’s plan to build and maintain a Global Digital Public Infrastructure Repository (GDPIR), a virtual repository of DPI” that would be shared voluntarily by all countries.^[7] This is a unique Indian initiative in the emerging global digital world, taken at a time the world’s major technology power centres are focused on confrontation rather than cooperation.

While setting its targets for sustainable development, Agenda 2030 acknowledged that without peace and security, it would not be possible to achieve the SDGs. The September 2023 UN SDG Summit pointed to “numerous crises” that had overtaken the world since 2015 to imperil the achievement of the SDGs. Most of these crises were due to a malfunctioning UN Security Council (UNSC). They have aggravated the effects of the unprecedented Covid pandemic that overtook the world in early 2020.

The UNSC failed for six months to respond to Covid.^[8] The pandemic left hundreds of millions in developing countries without access to vaccines, eroding their progress on achieving the SDGs, and pushing them back into extreme poverty. India’s national initiative to share its vaccines under the Vaccine Maitri initiative fell short of the global requirements, particularly in developing countries, due to the protectionist policies of Western manufacturers. The joint multilateral initiative by India and South Africa in the World Trade Organization for a Vaccine Waiver from trade-related restrictions was thwarted by the West.^[9]

An ineffective UNSC has resulted in the gradual erasure of the mechanism to use UN peacekeeping operations (UNPKOs) to create diplomatic space for sustainable political settlements, particularly in Africa. During the past year, countries like Mali, Sudan, and Somalia have withdrawn their consent to host UN peacekeeping missions. This is an ironic situation for India, the single largest troop contributor to UNPKOs. More than 275,000 Indian troops have served with distinction in 50 UNPKOs across all the continents so far. Indian women troops, first deployed as a full unit in 2007 in the UNPKO in Liberia, have won accolades in 2019 and 2024 for their outstanding contributions in the difficult UNPKOs in the civil-war afflicted South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Out of the 4374 UN troops killed on duty so far, as many as 179 have been from India. It was India that initiated the UNSC resolution in August 2021 to oblige host governments to protect UN peacekeepers.^[10] In September 2015, India proposed the establishment of a Memorial Wall to the fallen peacekeepers who “laid down their lives defending the highest ideals of the United Nations”.^[11] The implementation of this project by 2026 has been agreed to by the UNGA.

As an elected member of the UNSC for 2021-2022, India witnessed first-hand the UNSC’s ineffectiveness, and increasing irrelevance, in Asia due to its unreformed structure and methods. India’s Act East policy designed to integrate India with South-East Asia has been held hostage by the UNSC’s failure to bring about a political settlement in Myanmar since February 2021. UNSC inaction in brokering a political settlement for the ongoing conflicts to India’s west, in Iraq, Yemen, and Palestine/Israel, have converged since late 2023 to create turbulence for India’s core strategic interests in the western Indian Ocean region.

India’s maritime security concerns were highlighted during India’s Presidency of the UNSC on 9 August 2021 during a virtual meeting of UNSC members, chaired by the Prime Minister of India and attended at head of state/government level by President Vladimir Putin of Russia, President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya, and Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh of Vietnam.^[12] Subsequent UNSC inaction on this key issue has escalated the economic costs and smooth flow of India’s maritime trade through the western Indian Ocean. This is a region where over 10 million Indian nationals are in the workforce, remitting $40 billion a year annually into the Indian economy.

To India’s north-west, the UNSC’s jettisoning of its unanimous March 2020 U.S.-drafted resolution for a political settlement in Afghanistan following the withdrawal of NATO troops erased in one stroke India’s incrementally built strategic space in that country since 2002. It jeopardized India’s ongoing development partnership with Afghanistan, including the education and empowerment of Afghan women, and ambitious connectivity links with energy resource-rich Central Asia. As President of the UNSC during August 2021, India was blindsided by this act on 15 August 2021 by its Western strategic partners.

In 2005, world leaders, aware of the challenges to its “legitimacy and implementation of its decisions” due to its non-representative character and opaqueness of decision-making, had unanimously mandated early reform of the UNSC.^[13] On 14 September 2015, the UNGA unanimously adopted the documented written views of over 120 member-states on the 5 agreed areas of UNSC reform, including on the question of the veto. As a developing country seeking to become an equal participant in UNSC decision-making, India played a major role in this outcome.^[14] However, stalled progress on adopting a UNGA resolution to amend the Charter and reform the UNSC has remained a major challenge for multilateralism since 2016.

Beginning with the UN’s 75th anniversary meetings in 2020, India has led calls for “reformed multilateralism”^[15] to overcome structural flaws in multilateral institutions that constrain the transformation of India. These include the refusal of the International Monetary Fund to implement agreed reforms in its quota-based decision-making system giving greater role to emerging markets such as India; the atrophy that threatens the smooth functioning of the World Trade Organization, creating space for a revival of unilateral and protectionist policies of major trading nations; and UN reforms including that of the UNSC, where the veto power of the non-elected five permanent members prevents democratically elected members from having an equal role in taking decisions.

Due to its increasing contributions to the UN, and the investment in its partnership with developing countries, represented in the Voice of the Global South Summit (VGSS) initiative, India has a platform to galvanize reforms. 125 countries responded to India’s VGSS initiative, including 47 from Africa, 31 from Asia, 29 from Latin America and the Caribbean, 11 from Oceania, and 7 from Europe.^[16]

In September 2024, the UN will hold its Summit of the Future. India’s priority is to get widespread support for calls for “reformed multilateralism” as a call to action, responding to the current disarray in which multilateralism finds itself. With the 80th anniversary of the UN in 2025, the Global South must lead the initiative in the UNGA to convene a General Conference to review and update the UN Charter, making it a responsive framework for a reformed and effective UN/multilateral system.^[17]

Endnotes

^[1] Ambassador (Retd.) Asoke Mukerji led the Indian delegation to the United Nations in New York that successfully implemented the proposal to declare 21 June an annual International Yoga Day in December 2014, and negotiated Agenda 2030 on Sustainable Development in September 2015.
Permanent Mission of India to the United Nations, New York. “Statement by Ambassador Asoke K. Mukerji introducing the draft resolution on the International Day of Yoga, A/69/L.17, UN General Assembly, 11 December 2014”. https://www.pminewyork.gov.in/IndiaatUNGA?id=NzE1 [3]
^[2] Modi, Narendra. “PM welcomes UN decision to declare 21st June as International Day of Yoga”, 11 December 2014. https://www.narendramodi.in/pm-welcomes-un-decision-to-declare-21st-june-as-international-day-of-yoga-7015 [4]
^[3] Modi, Narendra. “Prime Minister’s Address during the International Conference on Rule of Law for supporting 2030 Development Agenda”, 4 March 2016. https://www.narendramodi.in/pm-modi-at-the-international-conference-on-rule-of-law-for-supporting-the-2030-development-agenda-427789 [5]
^[4] NITI Aayog, “SDG India Index 2020”. https://sdgindiaindex.niti.gov.in/#/ranking [6]
^[5] World Integrated Trade Solution, “Trade Summary for India 2021”. India’s international trade contributed about 46% of its GDP. https://wits.worldbank.org/countrysnapshot/en/IND [7]
^[6] Press Information Bureau, India. “Text of PM’s address at the 75th UNGA Session, 2020. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1659410 [8]
^[7] Ministry of External Affairs, India. “G20 New Delhi Leaders Declaration”, 9 September 2023. https://www.mea.gov.in/Images/CPV/G20-New-Delhi-Leaders-Declaration.pdf [9], para 56.ii
^[8] Charbonneau, Bruno. “The Covid-19 test of the United Nations Security Council”, International Journal 2021, Vol. 76(1) 6-16. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0020702020986897 [10]
^[9] Strzyzynska, Weronika. “WTO fails to reach agreement on providing global access to Covid treatments”, 14 February 2024, The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/feb/14/wto-fails-to-reach-agreement-on-providing-global-access-to-covid-treatments [11]
^[10] United Nations Security Council resolution 2589 dated 18 August 2021. https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/n21/229/15/pdf/n2122915.pdf?token=67Dp76qqy1lx7TBpSZ&fe=true [12]
^[11] Modi, Narendra. “India’s commitment to UN peacekeeping will remain strong and grow”, Summit on Peace Operations, 28 September 2015. https://www.narendramodi.in/statement-by-prime-minister-at-the-summit-on-peace-operations--356824 [13]
^[12] Mukerji, Asoke Kumar. “India in the UN Security Council: monthly recap for August 2021”, ICWA, August 2021. https://icwa.in/show_content.php?lang=1&level=1&ls_id=6380&lid=4393 [14]
^[13] UNGA resolution A/RES/60/1 dated 16 September 2005, para. 153. https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/generalassembly/docs/globalcompact/A_RES_60_1.pdf [15]
^[14] Ministry of External Affairs, India. Answer to Lok Sabha Unstarred Question 631 dated 02.12.2015. https://www.mea.gov.in/lok-sabha.htm?dtl/26094/Q+NO631+UNSC+REFORMS [16]
^[15] See note 6 above.
^[16] Ministry of External Affairs, India. “First Voice of Global South Summit”, 12-13 January 2023. https://www.mea.gov.in/voice-of-global-summit.htm [17]
^[17] Mukerji, Asoke. “Reformed Multilateralism at the United Nations”, American Diplomacy (February 2021). https://americandiplomacy.web.unc.edu/2021/02/reformed-multilateralism-at-the-united-nations/ [18]

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