Move a UN office to India

Arnab Guha is a NRIOL featured columnist. To read about Arnab Guha, please Know more.

Fifty-one years after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations has not yet found the will to relocate a single global head office of some 13 major UN organisations from Western Europe or North America to an Asian, African or Latin American state.

The Declaration's preamble claims the "recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family" as being "the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world". But some outside the North Atlantic rim may well argue that the poetry of the Declaration remains little more than a string of expansive sentences.

Relocating UN offices would not be merely symbolic. The decentralisation of one of the most formidable post-holocaust efforts at international cooperation would make for a stronger UN. It would also contribute to finding an effective diplomatic solution to some of the greatest regional crises in the world. For instance, what if the UN offered to move the headquarters of the High Commissioner for Refugees from Geneva to Dharamsala, India? Radical as it may seem, such a move may well have prevented the much-denounced South Asian nuclear crisis of 1998.

How might the presence of the global head office of a major UN branch organ have averted...  the nuclear-muscle flexing of India? The two basic motives behind the Indian nuclear test were national security and national pride. First, in terms of regional security and stability, one may conjecture that the presence of the international headquarters of such an influential organisation in the region would, in itself, serve as a powerful deterrent to potential aggressors.

Second, and more importantly, it would have addressed the issue of national pride by acknowledging the moral stand adopted by India over three decades of self-imposed nuclear discipline, not to mention India's traditional acceptance of the region's refugees in a sustained manner that is unparalleled elsewhere in the developing world. Indeed, India is rarely acknowledged for having had the courage, even as a very young and insecure state, to brave the wrath of China by offering asylum to the Dalai Lama and his followers. After all, this was a time when it was neither prudent nor fashionable for sundry world leaders and screen personalities to seek photo opportunities with the exiled head of the Tibetan people.

More pragmatically, relocating the refugee commission to the subcontinent makes a lot of sense, given that all the states in the region have seen millions of refugees and continued transmigration. Couple that with the fact that India is a functioning democracy that is no less stable than Italy or Japan, has a free press and an internationally respected national human rights commission which, if anything, could do even better with an influx of international humanitarian capital.

Instead of selectively protesting human rights abuses in politically convenient targets, well-intentioned citizens and governments of North Atlantic states ought to start lobbying the UN for a fair, intelligent and strategic relocation of their major branch headquarters to Asian, African and Latin American states.

Imagine a scenario where the UN offered to move the office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights from Geneva to Beijing, or Hong Kong. This may have proved an effective diplomatic move towards addressing China's human rights record while, at the same time, applauding the tremendous potential of one of the largest and oldest economies in the world. Such a move would have gone an equal distance towards enhancing the world's faith in the UN's commitment to a truly international and inclusive world order, and given meaning to the terms 'dialogue' and 'constructive engagement'.

And the Indian government, on its part, will do better to drop its hackneyed claims to join the UN veto-club and concentrate, instead, on lobbying to host one of the global headquarters of a major UN branch in New Delhi. This would be an instance of strategic diplomacy that would help direct international focus on India's civic achievements and place New Delhi as a major power node on the network of international capitals.

And, on this 51st anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, such a move would no doubt help establish the UN as a truly mature and inclusive body.  Read more 

(A version of this piece appeared in the Vancouver Sun (Canada) on 10 December 1998)
- Arnab Guha in Canada
December 12, 1999

The views of this column are the author's own, and do not necessarily represent the views of NRI Online.

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