Comment: India and the U.N. Peace-keeping Force. (2001, 20 Marks)
The Charter’s plan for a UN army under Article 43 was never implemented. The peacekeeping force that replaced it was improvised in 1956, when Lester Bowles Pearson proposed and Dag Hammarskjöld built UNEF I to separate the parties after Suez: lightly armed, consensual and impartial, “Chapter Six and a Half”. India helped make that formula work and has since become one of the force’s pillars, and one of its sharpest critics.
Why the force suited India
- Normative fit: it matched Nehruvian internationalism and non-alignment, and Article 51 of the Constitution, letting India strengthen the rules without joining a bloc.
- Status in a usable currency: a poor state with a large, professional army could earn standing, a classic middle-power niche.
- Solidarity: most missions were in decolonising Africa and Asia, which gave India’s anti-colonial diplomacy a practical form.
What India has given the force
- Presence at creation: Vengalil Krishnan Krishna Menon’s 1952 prisoner-of-war formula broke the Korean deadlock, and Indian troops guarded the prisoners; India then served in UNEF I and the Congo.
- Scale and sacrifice: on India’s own count nearly 300,000 personnel in over 50 missions, and 184 dead, including Gurbachan Singh Salaria, whose Param Vir Chakra (1961) is the only one won on UN service.
- Leadership: about fifteen Force Commanders, from Prem Singh Gyani (UNEF I) to Satish Nambiar (UNPROFOR), and Kiran Bedi at the head of UN Police (2003).
- Norm-setting: the first all-women Formed Police Unit (Liberia, 2007) and resolution 2589 (2021) on crimes against peacekeepers, which resolution 2823 (June 2026) extends.
The moment of 2001
The force was then being rethought. The Brahimi Report (August 2000) called for robust doctrine, clear and achievable mandates, and consultation with troop contributors. In Sierra Leone that year, Indian troops broke a rebel siege at Kailahun in Operation Khukri, yet India pulled its contingent out after its Force Commander’s dispute with mission leaders. Council resolution 1353 (June 2001) then formalised meetings with contributors. India welcomed the consultation but distrusted the robustness.
India’s agenda for the force
- Classical principles: consent, impartiality and minimum force are constitutive; a force that attacks one party, as the 2013 Force Intervention Brigade did, becomes a party.
- Voice: citing Article 44, India calls the triangular Council–Secretariat–contributor mechanism tokenistic. At the Assembly’s August 2026 debate on the Secretary-General’s review of peace operations, it asked that contributors be “substantively engaged in mandate formulation”, not briefed afterwards.
- Money and safety: higher, timely reimbursement and better force protection through technology such as the UNITE AWARE platform.
Significance and limits
- India’s case is that those who bear the risk have no say: the Council writes mandates, rich states pay, the Global South serves and dies. Ramesh Thakur (2007) called this division of labour a “creeping apartheid”.
- But contribution has not bought influence; contributors are substitutable, and India has published no doctrine on when it will serve. C. Raja Mohan (2013) adds the paradox of a state that defends consent at the UN yet acts unilaterally in South Asia.
- Its caution on robust mandates sits uneasily with Rwanda and Srebrenica, and with its own brigades’ combat in Katanga.
- The force is shrinking: US arrears forced a 15% spending cut and 25% troop repatriation in 2025, UNIFIL ends under resolution 2790, and India’s deployment fell from 5,384 (September 2024) to 4,278 (February 2026).
Conclusion
India is the most experienced partner the UN force has, and its record gives moral weight to its demands. Twenty-five years after Brahimi, the next phase turns on whether the 2026 review gives contributors a real role in drafting mandates; without it, India’s investment in a contracting instrument will yield diminishing returns.