UN Security Council meet on Article 370

The UN Security Council meet to discuss the Kashmir issue yielded the expected outcome - no result. Pakistan's all weather friend China supported the rouge nation. Russia accredited India's decision to scrap Article 370 as its internal matter. The rest 3 other veto holding members, US, Britain and France stayed neutral, again as expected.

We, in India being brought up in a Bureaucracy dominated environment consider UN as a big thing. Needless to say, it is the world's biggest, bloated bureaucracy which houses a bunch of entitlement seekers, famous for their inefficiency and lack of accountability. A spineless organization, it is known more for failures than success on its Balance Sheet ever since its inception in 1945. 

A sizable amount of its maintenance is born by the Americans Taxpayers. Now high time it gets dissolved, or US kicks them out of its own soil. What a blatant waste of prime real estate properties in New York and Washington DC for a bunch of freeloaders !!!

The nations in United Nations, in contrary to the name suggests, are hardly United. In spite of tons of money poured into many poor nations (mostly American money), those nations still languish in poverty. Those who have succeeded in moving 10s of millions out of poverty (notably China and India), have done so by helping themselves and with some help from Private charitable agenies, rather than anything remotely from UN.

The Security Council is used as the personal fiefdom of its veto wielding members, to further their own selfish agenda. It has hardly achieved any world peace and stability, which was supposed to be the primary goal when the United  nations was formed 70 years ago.

In June, 1981 following the Israeli strike on the Iraqi Nuclear Reactor on the outskirts of Baghdad, US promptly vetoed any UN resolution against Israel.

I still vividly remember this cartoon by R K Laxman on the front page of Times Of India, where the UN Secretary General says to the recalcitrant, mockingly grimacing Israeli PM - "The more you launch such an attack, you will be condemned more severely".

35 years down the road, not much has changed. Now this behemoth global Babudom is not expected to fix the Kashmir imbroglio. So, more their meets on Kashmir is ignored, better it is. 

At the same time, let's not be under the illusion that every nation on earth shares our hatred towards Pakistan and our BHAKTI (devotional love) laden blind support for each of Modi's decisions when it comes to foreign policy. Just because Modi scrapped 370, every nation on earth will blindly support us - simply because we view India being right and Pakistan is wrong 

International geopolitics is purely self interest driven and everything is not judged black and white. There are tons of gray areas. All politics is local and preservation of self interest laced with hypocrisy is the leitmotif of the foreign policy of every nation. 

Let's take the example of the famous five permanent members of the UN Security Council. They all have all their self interest to grind. Russia is not our bosom friend, it's supporting us because we have been its ally since Cold war days and we buy a lot of military weapons from them. America can't abandon Pakistan due to its strategic interests. China needs to outsource its containment of India to Pakistan to keep India busy. Britain and France had no interest and hence no intention in taking sides.

And there is so much hypocrisy - China forces its Uighur Muslim dissidents to eat pork, drink liquor, cut beards whereas the Islamic world is conspicuously quite. It harasses protesters in Hong Kong while lecturing India on peace in Kashmir. Other nations have their share of hypocrisy, listing all of them is beyond the scope of this blog. All said and done - Each one has it's own self interest to support, oppose or stay neutral to Indo - Pak tension.

Let's say Rwanda and Burundi, two nations with history of fighting start fighting again. India knows Rwanda is the perpetrator but has billions of dollars of business interest in the country. I am sure hardly anyone will bother or raise a voice if Modi takes a neutral position in Rwanda - Burundi issue. He will be hailed as practicing pragmatic geopolitics.

Everything in this world is relative. Someone's terrorist is another one's freedom fighter - rest of the hardly care if unimpacted. Real diplomacy will be long term - which will be more outside UN and how the relevant powers US, China, Russia, Japan, Gulf nations, African Union react as dust settles down. We have to wait to see that.