NEW DELHI – India has been left fuming as Pakistan today criticised Indiafor seeking expansion of the UN Security Council’s permanent membership,saying proposals that promote “national aspirations” of some member statescannot enhance representative nature of the powerful organ of the worldbody.

Pakistan’s Ambassador to the UN Maleeha Lodhi opposed the G-4 nations’ -India, Brazil, Germany and Japan – position on Security Council reformduring Intergovernmental Negotiations here.

The G-4 grouping has been seeking expansion of the permanent andnon-permanent seats of the Security Council to make the powerful UN bodymore representative and reflective of the changing global order. The fournations support each other’s bids for permanent seats on an expandedSecurity Council.

Lodhi criticised India, saying “without prejudice to the Common AfricanPosition for representation on behalf of an entire region, we are at a lossto understand how proposals that seek to promote the national aspirationsof some member states, can enhance the representative nature of theSecurity Council, when the region in question, has neither bestowed thatprivilege on them, nor does it enjoy the right to hold them to account”.

A press release issued by Pakistan’s Permanent Mission to the UN said thatthe G-4 nations “have shown no flexibility” in their campaign for expandingthe Security Council by 10 seats, with 6 additional permanent and fournon-permanent members.

It said the Italy/Pakistan-led Uniting for Consensus (UfC) group opposedany additional permanent members. “As a compromise, UfC has proposed a newcategory of members not permanent members with longer duration in terms anda possibility to get re-elected once,” the statement said.

Noting that representativeness and accountability were two sides of thesame coin, Lodhi said the greater the accountability, the better therepresentativeness and that one cannot co-exist without the other.

“Applied in the context of the Security Council, it is evident that theseconditions cannot be met by an expansion in the permanent category,” shesaid.”

This is acknowledged by UN charter itself, wherein permanent members areidentified by name without creating any pretence of regional or equitabledistribution,” she said. Lodhi said that it was in the non-permanentcategory where the elements of equitable representation were embedded,adding that the reform process itself has to be a membership-driven one.

Earlier, India’s Permanent Representative to the UN Ambassador SyedAkbaruddin, speaking on behalf of the G-4 at the informal meeting onIntergovernmental Negotiations, had called for transparency in negotiationson Security Council reforms, underlining that countries and groups makingproposals, specifically on veto and regional representation, shouldnecessarily be named in the documents framed for the discussions.

“Currently, we see several unattributed propositions. Serious proposalsmade with genuine intent are not orphans without support. Or is it thatthose who have initially suggested these no longer desire to be associatedwith them. If that is so, we need to know.

If not, we should not be selective in attributing,” Akbaruddin had said atthe session on March 27 as member states discussed the paper circulated’Revised Elements of Commonality and Issues for Further Consideration’.