Evaluate the role India has played in U.N. Peace-keeping activities and the cause of global disarmament. (2005)
India’s peacekeeping and its disarmament diplomacy express one claim: that India is a producer of international security rather than a consumer of it, measured by what it contributes and what it renounces. Both rest on Jawaharlal Nehru’s belief that a weak state is safest in a strong, rule-bound order. Both have earned respect; neither has delivered decisive influence.
Peacekeeping: the record
- From the Korean custodian force (1953) and UNEF I at Suez to the Congo, Namibia, Cambodia, Somalia, Lebanon, the DRC and South Sudan, India has sent, on its own count, nearly 300,000 personnel to over 50 missions; 184 have died.
- It has supplied about fifteen Force Commanders, the first all-women Formed Police Unit (Liberia, 2007), a training centre used by other contributors, and resolution 2589 (2021) on crimes against peacekeepers.
Peacekeeping: the limits
- Contribution has not become voice: in August 2026 India was still asking that contributors be engaged in mandate formulation, as it had since the 1990s.
- Its stance is uneven: wary of offensive mandates and the responsibility to protect, yet its troops fought in Katanga and serve under protection-of-civilians mandates. It also withdrew from Sierra Leone in 2000.
- In a contracting system its deployment fell to 4,278 by February 2026.
Disarmament: the record
- Nehru’s 1954 “standstill” proposal was among the earliest calls by any government for a halt to nuclear testing; India signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963.
- India rejected the NPT (1968) as legitimising five arsenals while barring others, with Article VI’s disarmament promise unenforced.
- Rajiv Gandhi’s Action Plan (Third Special Session on Disarmament, June 1988) proposed verifiable elimination in three stages by 2010.
- India is party to the Chemical Weapons Convention, whose declared stockpile it finished destroying in 2009, and the Biological Weapons Convention.
- It tables annual Assembly resolutions on Reducing Nuclear Danger and on keeping weapons of mass destruction from terrorists, and backs a non-discriminatory fissile material cut-off treaty.
Disarmament: the critique
- Realists read the advocacy as cover. At the Conference on Disarmament in 1996 Arundhati Ghose dismissed the draft CTBT as “a nuclear weapon test explosion ban treaty”, not a disarmament measure; India blocked consensus there and tested in May 1998. Jaswant Singh (“Against Nuclear Apartheid”, Foreign Affairs, 1998) recast the tests as a refusal of a discriminatory order.
- Since 1998 the agenda has turned declaratory: SIPRI counts about 190 Indian warheads (January 2026), and India stays outside the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
- The defence: India keeps a voluntary test moratorium and a no-first-use doctrine (2003), and its criteria (universality, non-discrimination, verification) are unchanged since 1954. Kenneth N. Waltz’s argument that more nuclear states may mean more stability (1981) explains why India would not disarm alone between two nuclear neighbours.
Evaluation
| Peacekeeping | Disarmament | |
|---|---|---|
| Consistency | High since 1950 | High in principle, broken in 1998 |
| Norm-setting | Women police, accountability, technology | Test ban, non-discrimination |
| Influence | Low over mandates | Low over the nuclear order |
The two records differ in one respect: peacekeeping costs India lives but no security, while disarmament would cost security, so its advocacy is principled but conditional.
Conclusion
India has been a model contributor and a principled advocate, but rhetorical success has not become institutional leverage. With the 2026 NPT Review Conference ending without consensus, New START expired and peacekeeping shrinking, both records argue less for what India gives than for a seat where the rules are written.