India, 1995

It gives me great pleasure to

congratulate Mr. Freitas do Amaral on his election as

President of the General Assembly at its fiftieth session,

during which he will guide our discussions on what the

future of the United Nations should be. May I also convey

my thanks to the President of the General Assembly at its

forty-ninth session, Mr. Amara Essy, who, as it were, tilled

the ground which the new President will sow.

A fiftieth anniversary is a climacteric, usually joyous

but not necessarily so. In ancient India, this was around the

time in a man’s life that he would be expected to withdraw

into a forest, to spend the rest of his days in contemplation

of past and future, it being the assessment of our ancestors

that anything a man could usefully do he would have done

by then. No such drastic measures are needed for the

United Nations, not least because it has spent much of its

first 50 years meditating in a concrete jungle. And the

shadow of the woods of Bretton always loom over it. I do

think, however, that as we celebrate, which we should, the

survival of the United Nations, we should judge what it has

done and what it now needs to do. The United Nations

system has had remarkable success in helping to defeat

colonialism and apartheid, on social issues like universal

health care and women’s rights, and in banning, through

global, non-discriminatory treaties, two of the three

weapons of mass destruction. These are considerable

achievements. But a clear pattern emerges from them.

Whenever the United Nations has acted on principle,

responding to the felt needs and priorities of the majority of

its membership, it has done well. When it has pursued

narrow agendas or succumbed to special pleading, it has

not.

If we were setting out tasks for the United Nations

today, what would be the major trends and challenges we

would expect it to address? The first is the international

economy, transformed by global movements of trade,

capital and labour; driven by forces which can break

developing economies; regulated — if they can be at all —

in forums outside the United Nations, which is therefore

marginalized in this most momentous of contemporary

developments. The second is an opening up of political

systems, with democracy the norm of national

governance. The United Nations welcomes this and urges

the recalcitrant to change, but is itself sapped by

undemocratic systems and institutions. The third is the

scourge of war increasingly replaced by the scourge of

terrorism, which, for the countries that sponsor it, is war

by other means. The United Nations, set up to save

succeeding generations from the scourge of war, ignores

it, as the League of Nations, to its fatal peril, ignored the

threat of xenophobia.

These are complex and titanic forces. We, therefore,

cannot accept, either as a statement of fact or as a basis

of policy, the view that all this meant was that the days

of absolute sovereignty were over. Sovereignty has never

been absolute. Most Members of the United Nations

joined immediately after emerging from colonial rule,

with their economies destroyed, and dependent on foreign

languages for communication, on imperial capitals for

support and on donors for subsistence. This is hardly the

stuff on which absolute sovereignty is built. It was, in

fact, one of the great virtues of the United Nations that it

gave fledgling nations space to exercise the sovereignty

so cruelly circumscribed elsewhere. Therefore, the United

Nations should not claim a unilateral right to intervene in

the affairs of its Members. Sovereignty can be diluted

only with the voluntary consent of nation States accepting

obligations that are non-discriminatory or, in exceptional

circumstances, where State authority has collapsed. Far

from enfeebling sovereignty, it is the task of the United

Nations to nurture it in a world that has made the

powerful more dominant and the weak increasingly

powerless. We must never forget that this Assembly is an

assembly of our nations united. The United Nations rests

on the commitment to it of sovereign nations.

There is clearly an enormous need for global action

to deal with complex issues which have no territorial

limits or borders. This is the task of the United Nations.

Developing countries which represent the majority of the

United Nations, obviously want it to focus on the issues

of most pressing concern to them. That is not only fair:

that would be the democratic thing to do. For us, the

single most important task is development, and we expect

this to be the highest priority on the international agenda,

as it is on our domestic agendas. Sadly, it is not. The

Agenda for Development looks lamentably like an

appendix. Can we, at this session, pledge ourselves to

honour the commitments, freely negotiated but never

implemented, which will make development possible in

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the South and make the world, for all of us, a better and

more peaceful place?

It is just as important for the United Nations to have

a say in the decisions that guide the international economy.

Chapter IX of the Charter gave it the task to promote

higher standards of living, solutions of international

economic, social, health and related problems, and universal

respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. Like

the United Nations, the World Trade Organization gives

equal weight to the votes of all its members, but it would

be a pity if the World Trade Organization cut even the

tenuous links between the General Agreement on Tariffs

and Trade (GATT) and the United Nations and, decided

instead that global economic policies would in the future be

coordinated between it, the World Bank and the

International Monetary Fund, where the system of weighted

voting makes the voice of the developing countries

irrelevant. At the same time, several studies commissioned

to coincide with this anniversary claim that the United

Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD)

no longer has a useful purpose. This can either mean that

the problems UNCTAD addresses — development

strategies, poverty alleviation, resource transfers and debt,

and the transfer of technology — have been settled, or are

now irrelevant. Neither is true. These continue to be

burning issues for developing countries, and if the United

Nations chooses to ignore them it will not serve the needs

of its Member States.

The United Nations must assume its Charter

responsibility to supervise and coordinate global economic

policies. In the World Trade Organization efforts have been

made to link trade to environment and labour standards.

The World Bank, in its World Development Report 1995,

warns about

“the proliferation of protectionist demands, many of

them under the guise of demands for fair trade and a

level playing field”.

If, indeed, there is a genuine interest in protecting the

environment and the interests of labour in developing

countries, why are the United Nations Environment

Programme (UNEP) and the International Labour

Organization (ILO) being sidelined in this exercise? The

answer must be that there is no provision in these bodies

for the coercive, retaliatory action which would be available

under the sanctions regime of the World Trade

Organization.

However, the industrialized countries say that

environmental and labour standards must be harmonized

upwards, because otherwise transnational corporations

would go where these standards were the lowest. This of

course implies that transnational corporations have an

appalling and exploitative standard of behaviour, but

when, in the 1970s and 1980s, the United Nations tried to

develop a code of conduct for transnational corporations,

we were told that transnational corporations were models

of virtue. How do these two views cohere?

The problem posed by these global economic forces

is enormous. Trade is the oxygen of our economies, but

cross-border trade between transnational corporations

constitutes one third of world trade and almost 15 per

cent of gross global product. No developing country, or

group of developing countries, can match this commercial

strength, augmented, of course, by the enormous weight

of financial flows, which can make or break a country’s

financial structure.

The third element in the trinity of mobility in the

international economy is migration. At present 125

million people live outside their countries, but more than

half of them move between developing countries; this is

not, therefore, as it has so often been misrepresented, only

a problem for the developed world. It is disturbing,

however, that those who insist on unfettered and truly

global flows of capital and trade also insist on restrictions

being placed on the movement of labour. Economic

arguments are given to justify this, but there are also

claims that large migrations disturb the way a society

thinks of itself as a unified cultural or ethnic entity.

The President returned to the Chair.

It would be honest to recognize these fears as racist.

India is a model of how these fears can be overcome. On

the one hand, over the past decade several million illegal

immigrants have come into India. We know to our cost

the political, economic and social strain this causes.

However, we do not accept a racial basis for

discriminating against legal migrants. We do not accept

that nationhood is based on race, any more than it is

based on religion or any other exclusive attribute. The

waves of migration that have washed over India have

made us a multi-ethnic society; we have been culturally

enriched, not impoverished. We urge the international

community not to let the forces of xenophobia rise again.

Sovereignty has never been threatened by fresh blood

freely welcomed; it has been threatened by the forces of

racist intolerance.

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This brings me naturally to the other force that now

threatens the sovereignty of so many nations. Terrorism is

the black plague of our times and it has been made more

dangerous by the mystique with which the media has

endowed it. It is argued sometimes that one man’s freedom

fighter is another man’s terrorist. This is specious logic. In

1922 Mahatma Gandhi suspended for several years the

freedom struggle in India because, in an incident in the

small village of Chauri Chaura, a mob burnt some

policemen to death. In Gandhi’s view, the view of the

ultimate freedom-fighter, the means must sanctify the ends.

What ends could possibly justify the barbarism of

taking an innocent foreigner in India hostage and beheading

him in cold blood? Foreign mercenaries did this to the

Norwegian Hans Christian Ostro last month. An empire of

terror is being built up with arms and money sent across

borders; its foot soldiers are drawn from the bigoted, its

leadership from ruthless, unprincipled men and, regrettably,

some women.

At every summit in recent years, whether of the non-

aligned, the Group of Seven, the Organization for Security

and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), or the Commonwealth,

Heads of State and Government have reaffirmed their

resolve to defeat all forms of terrorism. However, in the

United Nations, where we are all represented, we have been

unable to speak in such forthright terms. We must do so at

this fiftieth anniversary. To appease terrorism now will be

as dangerous as appeasing xenophobia was in the 1930s and

ultimately as destructive of both peace and democracy,

because terrorism, as I said earlier, is war by other means.

Whether it tries to violate the territorial integrity of a

country, as in India, in our State of Jammu and Kashmir, or

to unseat duly constituted Governments, as in Afghanistan,

the acts of States sponsoring terrorism are, in fact, acts of

war.

Democracies, as open societies, are particularly

vulnerable to terrorism. The United Nations welcomes the

global trend that has made democracy the norm of

governance, but has done nothing to defend democracies

from extremist and other threats. Instead, it comforts itself

with the mantras that democracy is development, and

democracies do not wage war. These neatly package all the

world’s problems and absolve the United Nations of any

further responsibility: establish democracy everywhere and,

automatically, development and peace will follow.

Both propositions are historically untrue. Democracies

that developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

either suppressed democratic rights until they became rich,

or grew rich on the ruthless exploitation of colonies.

When they shed their empires after the Second World

War democracy became development in Europe only in

the uniquely generous embrace of the Marshall Plan. The

myth that democracies do not wage war is destroyed by

the history of colonial rule and its wars, leading to the

conflagration of the First World War. The United Nations

should, therefore, take these propositions as objectives,

not as givens. Democracy should lead to development;

democracies should be peaceful.

I want to touch briefly upon two other global issues

which affect our lives — disarmament and human rights.

After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Mahatma Gandhi said that

the use of the atom bomb for the wholesale destruction of

men, women and children was the most diabolical use of

science. We were therefore appalled that, instead of

stepping back from the road to nuclear ruin, the nuclear-

weapon States sped faster and faster down it. As they

accelerated, India tried unsuccessfully to put on the

brakes. In 1954 we called for an end to nuclear testing. In

1965 we proposed principles for a non-proliferation

treaty. In 1982 we called for a convention to ban the use

of nuclear weapons and for an end to the production of

fissile material for nuclear weapons. In 1988 we proposed

to the United Nations a comprehensive action plan for a

world free of nuclear weapons.

Our goal — shared, I believe by most of us here —

is a world from which nuclear weapons have been

eliminated. The nuclear-weapon States claim to share this

goal, but their present objective is to retain nuclear

weapons while making sure others do not get them.

The logic of this is hard to understand. It cannot be

argued that the security of a few countries depends on

their having nuclear weapons and that that of the rest

depends on their not having them. What makes the NPT

such a pernicious document is that it legitimizes this

illogicality, and now that it has been made permanent it

has made the possession of nuclear weapons by the

nuclear-weapon States immutable and has made the goal

of global nuclear disarmament that much more difficult.

It is useful to recall that when India and other

developing countries proposed the NPT, a global balance

of responsibilities was envisaged. Those who did not have

nuclear weapons would not seek to acquire them; those

who had them would not try either to refine or develop

them or to increase their arsenals. This balance was never

honoured, with the result that 25 years after the signing

of the NPT the world is a much more dangerous place,

15

made so by the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the

arsenals of the nuclear-weapon States.

I recall this background because two years ago the

international community at last agreed to negotiate a

comprehensive test-ban treaty. We are glad that negotiations

are in progress, but we also note that nuclear-weapon States

agreed to a comprehensive test-ban treaty only after

acquiring the know-how to develop and refine their arsenals

without the need for tests. In our view, the comprehensive

test-ban treaty must be an integral step in the process of

nuclear disarmament. Developing new warheads or refining

existing ones after a comprehensive test-ban treaty is in

place, using innovative technologies, would be as contrary

to the spirit of the comprehensive test-ban treaty as the

NPT is to the spirit of non-proliferation. The comprehensive

test-ban treaty must contain a commitment binding on the

international community, especially the nuclear-weapon

States, to take further measures within an agreed

time-frame towards the creation of a nuclear-weapon-free

world.

The existence of nuclear weapons poses a threat to

peace and security. Only global nuclear disarmament can

guarantee that there will never be a nuclear war. Therefore,

despite the unfortunate legitimization of nuclear weapons

through the indefinite extension of the NPT, India will

continue to work with like-minded countries for the early

elimination of all nuclear weapons. We hope that at this

session the Assembly will finalize dates for the fourth

United Nations special session on disarmament, in 1997.

Human rights have always been a preoccupation of the

United Nations, but their protection and promotion of such

rights in each country is the primary responsibility of the

government. The universality and interdependence of all

human rights are also beyond question. That is precisely

why the United Nations system cannot promote and protect

human rights by a unilateral prioritization of individual

freedoms or a proliferation of intrusive mechanisms, or by

diverting funds from development activities to human rights

activities. The priorities of nations will differ. The United

Nations must balance the promotion of all human rights —

civil, cultural, economic, political and social — preserve

and propagate the values of every society and promote

tolerance for diversity and cross-cultural interaction.

Politicizing the human-rights agenda and using it to target

countries is undesirable.

The United Nations will become responsive to these

global issues and effective and efficient only if it also

becomes more democratic in its functioning. Developing

countries find it hard to identify with the agendas and

priorities of the United Nations; they feel that it now

represents the privilege of a few rather than the interests

of the many. If the majority of its Members become

disenchanted with it, what role can the United Nations

effectively play? For the United Nations to be more

effective, the General Assembly must be given new life

and breathe that life into the other bodies of the system.

The legitimacy and effectiveness of the Security Council

must be enhanced. An expansion of both permanent and

non-permanent members is a must if the Council is to

become a truly representative body acting on behalf of the

Members of the United Nations for the maintenance of

peace and security.

The members of the Movement of Non-Aligned

Countries have put forward a comprehensive proposal for

the reform and restructuring of the Security Council. India

believes that, to truly reflect the expanded membership of

the United Nations, developing countries must be included

as permanent members. New permanent members should

be chosen not arbitrarily, but on objective criteria. In the

League of Nations it was argued that one country had a

special right of entry into the Supreme Council. When

that was forced through, one or two of the other aspirants

left the League, starting its decline. We should not repeat

that tragedy. On objective criteria, some countries will

clearly qualify for permanent membership. We believe

India will be among them.

The United Nations has in recent years devoted itself

almost exclusively to peace-keeping, which is important,

but not the central issue of our times. It is judged,

naturally, by its record in these operations. There have

been successes and failures, and both provide the reason

and the need for introspection. India believes that United

Nations peace-keeping operations must be based on the

principles evolved over the last 50 years. Operations

guided by these principles have usually done well. Where

these have been abandoned, failure has been common.

Over the past year this truth has gained broad acceptance,

and the Special Committee on Peace-Keeping Operations

is now trying to collate these principles. It would be

desirable for the General Assembly at this fiftieth session

to agree on them. India will contribute to this work.

India has consistently supported the peace-keeping

activities of the United Nations. Indian troops have

participated in all major peace-keeping operations, ranging

from the Congo to Cambodia, Somalia and Mozambique.

We are currently participating in United Nations

peace-keeping operations in Rwanda, Angola, Haiti,

16

Liberia and Kuwait. We have also offered a brigade of

troops to the United Nations stand-by arrangement. India

will continue to contribute to United Nations efforts to

maintain international peace and security.

If the United Nations is to become a leading player on

the world scene, it must be given the means needed to do

the job we entrust to it. Clearly, setting out on a second 50

years with a crippling financial crisis is not the best way to

do so. In India we make considerable efforts to pay our

contributions promptly and in full. We believe that all

Members must pay their assessed contributions in full and

on time. Further, those in arrears must announce a schedule

for settlement. There can be no progress in the on-going

efforts for financial reform unless this is done.

The fiftieth session of the General Assembly is a

historic one. It is our responsibility to rejuvenate the United

Nations, give it the tasks we want it to do, and the means

with which to do them. We set up the United Nations

because we felt that all of us stood to gain from it. In the

dark days of the cold war and in the friction between North

and South, we seem to have lost this vision.

Since the inception of the United Nations, India has

been committed to the principles and objectives of the

Charter. In the last five decades we have played an

important role in shaping the United Nations agenda, taking

the lead on the crucial issues of decolonization,

disarmament, human rights and environment, among others.

On this historic occasion we pledge our continuing

commitment to the United Nations efforts to chart a new

course for the collective benefit of all humanity. As we

attempt to do so, I am reminded of Jawaharlal Nehru’s

speech to the General Assembly in November 1948, in

Paris. He said:

“The objectives are clear; your aim is clear; and yet,

in looking at that aim, we lose ourselves often, if I

may venture to say so, in smaller matters and forget

the main objective that we were looking at. Sometimes

it seems that the objective itself gets a little clouded”.

(Plenary Verbatim Records, Third Session, General

Assembly, 154th meeting, p. 16)

We must ensure that we set aside smaller matters, that

we do not allow the objective to get clouded and that we

move forward together in harmony and for the benefit of all

the people of the world.