What if India gave up on the UN?

by Richard Gowan | Aug 1, 2008 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, South Asia

My recent extended growl about the parlous state of peacekeeping has been cited as evidence in a fascinating online debate among Indian security analysts on whether their army should stay committed to UN operations. This debate is significant because (i) India is consistently among the top three contributors to UN forces, along with Pakistan and Bangladesh; (ii) it is even more important in terms of hard-to-find assets like helicopters; (iii) it is suffering a run of negative publicity about how badly some of its troops behave (the fact that a lot of this snark comes from the BBC irks some in the debate, who detect post-colonial prurience).

With India’s economy growing fast, the payments it receives from the UN in return for its troops are increasingly irrelevant. So might there come a moment when India decides that blue helmet deployments no longer befit its status and interests as a great power? Yes, and the sooner the better, according to two hawkish strategists in the Indian Express in early July. Edited highlights:

More Indian troops have died in the line of their UN duties than from any other country. According to the Indian Embassy in the US, “India has risked the lives of its soldiers in peacekeeping efforts of the United Nations, not for any strategic gain, but in the service of an ideal. India’s ideal was, and remains, strengthening the world body, and international peace and security.” That the Indian government should take pride in risking the lives of Indian soldiers in the “service of an ideal” is appalling. It now serves little more than bureaucratic interests.

In order to give the issue the attention it demands, India should immediately suspend all further UN deployments. This should be followed by a graduated withdrawal of all Indian troops operating under the UN flag. There might be a case for a small, token presence, in carefully chosen theatres. It is time for India to stop seeing foreign troop deployments as “risking lives in the service of an ideal.” Rather, they should be seen as being tightly coupled with vital foreign policy objectives, like for instance, securing India’s construction crews in Afghanistan. As India’s economic interests expand globally, it is likely that the need for such deployments will increase.

You can follow the debate sparked by these comments over at Pragmatic Euphony, a blog devoted to India’s national interest. Fears of new violence ahead in the eastern Congo suggest that Indian peacekeepers may be in the headlines again this summer, as this is one of the theatres in which they are squarely on the frontline. A rapid drawdown of Indian forces isn’t imminent – New Delhi has good reasons to look responsible after (i) it took flak for helping kill off Doha (whatever the merits!) and (ii) the IAEA signed off on the US-India nuclear deal this week.

But these online stirrings may be the start of something bigger. India could well lose faith in the relevance of peacekeeping – recent violence in Kashmir and reports that Pakistan was implicated in July’s attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul are reminders that it has urgent problems on its doorstep to tend to. New Delhi is also deeply skeptical about all the current talk about the Responsibility to Protect (as it demonstrated during the Burmese cyclone crisis) and is liable to demand an ever-greater say in UN strategy-making if it is to stay involved. That raises the tricky question of when if ever India will get a permanent Security Council seat…

If India cut back on its peacekeepers it would be incredibly difficult to sustain big peace operations in places like the Congo. This is often obscured by (i) a lazy assumption that the South Asians will be peacekeepers forever out of habit; (ii) a focus on the views of African troop suppliers, especially in Darfur; and (iii) possibly excessive excitement about the prospect of other countries getting involved, like China. China’s peacekeeping commitments are still less than a quarter of India’s.

I’ve got yet another academic analysis of the dynamics of UN ops out, in a book on “Strategies for Peace” (don’t be put off by the lime-green cover). I wrote it ages ago, but it highlights the South Asian contribution and how UN missions rely on a global compact between three categories of state: “those in which large-scale peace operations are deployed (mainly in Africa); those which supply the bulk of peacekeeping forces (most notably in South Asia and Africa); and those that provide most of the funding for peace operations (the United States, EU members and Japan).” Lose the Indians, and that compact starts to unravel.

Unfortunately (or thankfully, depending on your perspective) this new article isn’t online. But it concludes along the lines of a shorter think-piece I published last year about developing a new strategic consensus that all those involved in UN ops can buy into if they are to keep on keeping on… a consensus, I infer from the Indian online debate, that should be couched in interests not ideals.

UPDATE: check out Pragmatic Euphony’s interesting riposte to this post here.