NEW DELHI: External affairs minister S Jaishankar has called the United Nations “largely irrelevant” to decision-making on major global crises, blaming a “gridlocked” Security Council and its outdated composition for the organisation’s ineffectiveness.Speaking at the fifth Kautilya Economic Conclave in New Delhi on Monday, Jaishankar said the UN had struggled to play a meaningful role in addressing major international issues, including conflicts in the Gulf and Ukraine, crises in Africa and the Covid-19 pandemic.“Where the UN is concerned, I think it’s obvious to everybody by now that the UN is gridlocked,” Jaishankar said.“If you look at the big issues of the day… actually, the United Nations has been largely irrelevant to the decision-making,” he added.Jaishankar said much of the problem stemmed from the Security Council’s inability to reach decisions. He also questioned whether its current composition reflected the wider international community.The UN was founded with 51 members and now has almost four times that number, he noted.“So, if you have grown four times, and you want to keep the old board of management, it’s not going to work. I mean, it’s common sense,” he said.Jaishankar also criticised countries that he said were resisting UN reform while citing Africa’s interests as a reason.He said Africa had already presented a clear position during intergovernmental negotiations on what it wanted from reform of the world body.
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Despite his criticism, Jaishankar said the answer was not to bypass the UN.“We need the UN. The UN has done a big service to the international community,” he said.“Our job must be to ‘fix the UN, not to work around the UN’,” he added, saying the UN itself needed to contribute to the reform process.India has been pushing for comprehensive UN reforms, including expansion of the Security Council. It has worked with the G4 grouping of India, Japan, Brazil and Germany, as well as the L.69 group of developing countries, to build support for reform.Jaishankar has previously criticised the UN’s structure, saying the organisation had failed to keep pace with a world that had become more interconnected and multipolar.