Discuss the importance of India’s role in UN peacekeeping operations as a ground for its claim to a permanent seat in the UN Security Council. (2023, 15 Marks)
Article 23 of the Charter asks the Assembly, when electing non-permanent members, to give due regard to their contribution to international peace and security. Peacekeeping is India’s most tangible evidence of that contribution. Its weight is real, but it works as an argument from equity and performance, not from the Charter’s logic of permanence.
The record behind the claim
- Continuity since the 1950s: India chaired the Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission in Korea, served in the Congo, where Captain Gurbachan Singh Salaria won the only Param Vir Chakra for a UN mission (1961), and later in Somalia, Sierra Leone, Lebanon, the DRC and South Sudan.
- Scale: on India’s own count, nearly 300,000 personnel in more than fifty missions, with 184 killed. In February 2026 it had 4,278 uniformed personnel deployed, third behind Rwanda and Nepal.
- Quality: around fifteen Force Commanders; police, staff officers and experts, including the first all-women Formed Police Unit (Liberia, 2007); experience in ceasefire supervision, civilian protection and reconstruction.
- Continuing commitment: pledges at the Berlin Ministerial (May 2025) of a women-led police unit, counter-IED and quick-reaction capability; 565 Indian peacekeepers decorated at Malakal, South Sudan, in June 2026.
Why it matters as a ground
- Responsibility, not just rank: Hedley Bull tied great-power status to special responsibilities for order. Absorbing casualties where it has no national stake marks India as a responsible stakeholder, the credential hardest to fake.
- Those who execute should shape mandates. Article 44 already lets a state outside the Council join decisions on the use of its contingents, which concedes the principle. India’s long complaint that triangular consultation is tokenistic shows its limits; at the first UN Troop Contributing Countries’ Chiefs Conclave (New Delhi, October 2025, 32 countries), India pressed for contributors’ role in mandate formulation.
- Coalition value: the G4 foreign ministers’ statement of 22 September 2026 named greater participation by states that “contribute significantly” to peace and security as a goal of reform, turning the record into a criterion.
- Global South legitimacy: nearly all leading contributors are developing states, so India’s record also speaks for the constituency it claims to represent.
The limits
- Charter logic: contribution is the stated criterion for elected seats, which India has won eight times; permanence was allotted to the victors of 1945.
- Substitutability: Nepal, Rwanda and Bangladesh supply as many troops, and India’s own deployment fell from about 5,384 (September 2024) to 4,278.
- The division-of-labour trap: Ramesh Thakur (2007) warned of a “creeping apartheid” in which poor states supply troops while rich ones provide logistics and hold the senior posts; mass contribution can brand a state a client rather than a great power.
- A shrinking instrument: SIPRI counts 78,633 personnel in peace operations at the end of 2025, down 49% since 2016, and UNIFIL closes after 2026.
Conclusion
Peacekeeping gives India’s claim moral weight but not constitutional force. It persuades best as an argument about the Council’s performance: contributors write better mandates. India should therefore stress command, specialist units and consultation reform, and fold peacekeeping into a case that rests above all on representation.