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The Fiction of UNSC Permanent Seat Offer to India

By Alok Jagdhari

BJP/ RSS have spent decades pushing propaganda that India was offered a UN Security Council Permanent Membership with Veto rights and Nehru refused it.

There are several versions of this propaganda:

  • Nehru was offered this by Kennedy
  • Nehru was offered this by Krushchev
  • Nehru declined it and gave it to China

This should be a very easy one to debunk logically. After all, you simply have to ask for positive evidence. unfortunately, the all pervasive power of the propaganda means that we have to provide negative evidence

Fact #1

So let’s start with the history of United Nations. It was constituted in the aftermath of WW2, as a learning from the failed League of Nations. In order to ensure that every major power was represented and tied into the new multilateral body, unlike the League of Nations which US didn’t join and Japan walked out of, the victors of WW2 were accorded a special status and offered permanent UNSC seats with Veto Powers. Who were these 5 nations? The 5 Allied Powers that won WW2, viz USA, UK, France, USSR and REPUBLIC OF CHINA. It was the Republic of China which was chosen over the competing claims from the People’s Republic of China. Chiang Kai Shek and his Nationalists were the Republic of China, and Mao Tse Tung (Chairman Mao) were the People’s Republic of China. This was the year 1945. The link to the original documents is below. The UN Charter as well as the constiution of the UNSC with its 5 permanent members.

Pundit Nehru speaking at the UN General Assembly. [Photo Credit : rsz_unsc]

Fact #2

Immediately after the end of WW2, China plunged into an internal war between the Nationalist Government of Chiang Kai Shek and the Communist Government of Mao Tse Tung (or Mao Zedong). The Communist insurgents had been active since 1920s, but the intervening Japanese occupation forced both the Nationalists and the Communists to fight the Japanese. However, the hositilities resumed after the end of WW2 and eventually resulted in the retreat of Chiang Kai Shek and 2 million nationalist soldiers (faced off against 3.2m communist army) to the island of Taiwan. This was in October 1949.

Fact #3

Now we come to the second historical fact about the UNSC. In October 1971, the UNSC voted to transition the seat allocated to Republic of China to the People’s Republic of China, ie the Communist China. The same resolution expelled Taiwan from United Nations leaving the PRC as the sole inheritor of the Chinese seat in the UN and, logically, in the permanent member seat at the UNSC with Veto powers.

Fact #4

So how did this trope surface, and when did it surface. Strangely, it happened during Nehru’s lifetime. and the opposition asked Nehru to provide an answer. Which he did. In the Indian Parliament.The date – 27th September 1958! Link below and the original image of The Hindu piece here. If the Indian Prime Minister was lying, what were Atal Bihari and other Jan Sanghis doing in the Parliament? Why didn’t they raise a privilege motion against Nehru?

The above should be enough for any objective rational person to understand that the propaganda about Nehru giving up a UNSC Permanent Seat is purely scurrilous rumour mongering. However, if someone isn’t convinced thus far, we can now look at the circumstantial evidence

  • No nation has ever been offered a permanent UNSC Seat since the original Charter Members. Not in 1958. Or ever since.
  • By 1958 Japan was a US ally. So was West Germany. East Germany was an ally of USSR. Turks (the other great power for the previous 800 years) were ruled by secularists. While Austria had diminished, they had been the dominant European power for a few hundred years. But our andh bhakt would want us to believe that leaving aside all of these Great Powers, an offer was made to India. Just to India.
  • The reform of UNSC has been stuck for last few decades. All the plans to either do away with the veto or the expand the number of nations with Veto Powers, etc. have met with failure. Yet we should somehow believe that India would have managed to surmount all of these obstacles
  • Nearly all the documents from those times (1950s), even the top secret documents, have been de-classified. Presidents, Plenipotentiaries, Foreign Ministers, Ambassadors, etc. have published ream of autobiographies, and biographies. Not one of these archives, of USSR or US, or UN, or any other nation, has ever mentioned a whisper about the UNSC Permanent Seat offer to India or Nehru.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. AlignIndia does not take any responsibility for the content of the article.

Alok Jagdhari is a Financial Services Professional who lives in the United States. He studied at IIM-A and has a degree in Economics

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