UNchangeable?

With India officially nominating a candidate — Shashi Tharoor — for the UN’s top job, there’ll be unavoidably and justifiably a fair amount of domestic excitement at being in the race. UN races can be smooth and almost predetermined or complicated and bitterly fought. It’s too early to say whether India’s candidate will have an easy ride but what can already be said, and indeed has been said in different contexts, is that whoever heads the UN will inherit one of the world’s most change-resistant and pampered bureaucracies. To say this is not to argue in the same vein as America’s radical conservatives, who have for years argued that the UN is a waste and that America should stop contributing to it. This view doesn’t acknowledge the fact that a world without the UN will be worse off than a world with it. But the American Right’s bad-tempered critiques have had the value, over the years, of sharpening the focus on the UN’s way of functioning.

The oil for food scandal was just one of the many demonstrations of dodgy UN administrative practices. In general, the UN’s critics have complained that while the organisation has always been quick to demand its dues from member countries, it has been rather slow in implementing radical administrative reform. Unfortunately, India has never quite added its voice to those asking for change.

It used to be that criticising the UN was a sin against Third World solidarity and a craven acceptance of Western hegemony. Now that India’s foreign policy has somewhat progressed beyond that, the government should be confident enough to rationally assess the UN’s administrative weaknesses. True, a radically reformist platform may not be a vote getter — African nations, supposedly sympathetic to India’s candidate, may not like it — but if elected, the first Indian to head the UN should be its first boss who modernises it.