‘Development partners’ key to Bhandari’s victory
THE HAGUE India’s ties with countries assisted by it played a key role in his reelection
WASHINGTON: India’s vast network of ‘Development Partners’ among United Nations members played a “key role” in helping it clinch Dalveer Bhandari’s election to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), forcing Christopher Greenwood of Britain, a permanent member of the UN security council, to withdraw.
‘Development Partners (or partnerships)’ is a term India uses to define ties with countries — essentially “developing countries” — that it assists with aid and to whom it extends other types of cooperation and partnerships. These are mostly in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean.
“Our Development Partners were a key to victory,” said a member of the team that fashioned India’s strategy. “But the winning coalition also included other members, without whose support we could not have mounted this effort.”
Officials refused to name or give a number for these countries, insisting, one, the voting was by secret ballot, and, two, disclosing their identity could jeopardise their global relations, especially as it involved taking on a permanent member of UN security council and its backers.
Most Development Partners are members of the General Assembly, except those elected to the Security Council for temporary two-year terms. And the General Assembly, thus, became the focus of Indian strategists, who began to call it the ‘First Track’, as opposed to the UNSC (‘Second Track’).
And that was set into motion as Bhandari tied Greenwood — both sitting members of the world court — for the fifth vacancy in the court after the first round of voting on November 9. The
Indian diplomats went to work in various capitals, sounding out development partners and members of a coalition with a pitch that “this is a choice everybody has to make for a value framework, this was a choice everybody had to make about multilateralism, and broad-based or through restricted groups”.
India’s permanent representative to UN, Syed Akbaruddin, laid it out publicly at a UN reception for ICJ last week: “We have a choice today, therefore, of either acknowledging the spirit of our times and ending this process honourably or trying to stem the democratic drift of inclusivism. The choice we now have is about what shape we want to give to the future direction of multilateralism; Universalism or emphasis on opposition by a few.”
The pitch, overall, worked. And “as that started gaining traction”, Indian strategists were confident the “Second Track would at some stage change” because 10 of its 15 members were elected members of the general assembly, and six of them had already voted for Bhandari.
But when Britain sought to try the ‘Third Track’, the rarely used mechanism of calling a “joint conference” to break the deadlock election, India detected a “shift among some of our global partners on the Second Track (Security Council),” where permanent members were siding with Britain. “We understood that they were doing what they had to protect the old order.”
Then the ground shifted. Indians refused to name them. But their switching sides may have forced Britain to give up, as it was banking on the continued support of the nine that had voted for Greenwood consistently.