UNITED NATIONS — Frustrated by nearly two decades of stalled efforts to reform the UN Security Council, India sharply criticized the process on Tuesday, calling it a “theatre of the absurd” and urging member states to finally adopt a negotiating text to move the discussions forward.
“In the 17 years since the IGN format was initiated, it has been reduced to a theater of the absurd,” India’s Deputy Permanent Representative Yojna Patel said at a General Assembly meeting on Security Council reform. The Intergovernmental Negotiations (IGN) framework, launched in 2008, has become a cycle of repetitive debates that “lead nowhere,” she added.
Patel said the credibility of the reform process now depends on starting “text-based negotiations with transparent milestones and timelines,” calling for collective “introspection and soul-searching” on why the effort remains paralyzed.
“Are we willing to honestly work for achieving tangible progress, or are we condemned, like Sisyphus, to be trapped in this endless cycle till eternity?” she asked.
India expressed hope that the newly appointed IGN co-chairs — Kuwait’s Permanent Representative Tareq M. A. M. AlBanai and the Netherlands’ Permanent Representative Lise Gregoire-van Haaren — would guide the process toward concrete results during the current session.
Progress has long been hindered by the United for Consensus (UfC) group, led by Italy and including Pakistan, which opposes the expansion of permanent membership and has repeatedly blocked the adoption of a negotiating text. Patel said the group’s procedural maneuvers have doomed the process to “a Sisyphean fate.”
“There have been calls for patience and for building consensus, but consensus, when wielded as a veto by another name, becomes a tool of obstruction, not inclusion,” she noted.
India reiterated that expanding the number of permanent seats — especially for African nations — is essential to correcting historical inequities. The country also pushed back against proposals to add seats designated for the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), arguing that “faith cannot become the determining criteria for Council entitlement.”
India, along with Brazil, Germany, and Japan — the G4 nations — continues to lobby for expanding permanent membership and mutually support one another’s claims.
Speaking on behalf of the G4, Brazil’s Permanent Representative Sergio Franca Danese said the UN is widely viewed as “ineffective” and in need of structural change. “Reform is not an option, but an imperative. We must stop talking about talking and start negotiating,” he said. (Source: IANS)
