Jaishankar backs India-Africa push for a more representative UN Security Council

India and Africa cannot remain underrepresented in global decision-making, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said on Friday as he called for reform of the UN Security Council to make global governance more democratic and representative.

Addressing a gathering at the Adwa Victory Memorial Museum in Addis Ababa, Jaishankar said the existing global order disregarded the interests of both India and Africa, and accused unnamed forces of delaying reform. He said, "The current Council neither delivers effectively nor represents fairly. And the two shortcomings are clearly interconnected."

Calling for a more representative international order, Jaishankar said Africa should be represented fairly in both categories of UN Security Council membership. The Council has 15 members, including five permanent members - China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States - which hold veto powers that allow any one of them to block a substantive resolution. The remaining 10 non-permanent members are elected for two-year terms and do not have veto powers. Jaishankar also referred to India’s efforts during its 2023 G20 presidency to secure permanent membership for the African Union in the grouping. He arrived in Ethiopia on Thursday from Cote d’Ivoire on the final leg of his three-nation African tour, which also included Ghana.

Jaishankar said Ethiopia’s victory over Italy at Adwa had inspired struggles against colonialism and racial domination across Africa and beyond, and that it resonated with India’s freedom movement as both were centred on human dignity, political independence and the right to make sovereign choices. The museum commemorates Ethiopia’s victory over Italian forces at the 1896 Battle of Adwa, a landmark in African resistance to colonialism. "The essential question remains: who gets to decide our future? This is the quest that brings the Global South, especially India and Africa, together," he said.

Tracing ties between the two regions, Jaishankar said their relationship stretched back several millennia, long before modern nation-states, with the Indian Ocean linking their peoples through commerce, migration, languages, cultural practices and faith. He said the relationship must now move beyond historical solidarity, with India’s vision of becoming a developed nation by 2047 and Africa’s Agenda 2063 offering complementary pathways for transformation. Both sides, he said, placed industrialisation, infrastructure, connectivity, technology, human capital and sustainable growth at the centre of their development agendas. "Our right to industrialise must not be denied by flooding our markets with cheap goods. Nor indeed, by restricting our market access," he said.

Jaishankar said India was Africa’s fourth-largest trading partner, with bilateral trade nearing USD 100 billion. More than 220 Indian-supported development projects worth about USD 4.5 billion had been completed across the continent, he said, adding that "development is best served by self-reliance". He said India’s development partnership was guided by the priorities identified by African countries themselves, covering power generation, electricity transmission, water, agriculture, railways, healthcare, manufacturing and public infrastructure. Among the projects he cited were metro rail in Mauritius, hydropower projects in Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia and Burundi, drinking water pipelines in Tanzania, and power transmission lines in Cote d’Ivoire, Togo, Sudan and Benin. He also encouraged Indian businesses to view Africa as an investment destination, saying Indian companies had helped create local employment, promote value addition and strengthen national economies.

He called for stronger cooperation on food security, saying conflicts in other regions were making access to grain and fertilisers more difficult for Africa and the wider Global South. Cooperation in agricultural productivity, climate-resilient practices, value addition and food processing had therefore become more important, he said. "Partnerships of the future must help create capabilities, not promote dependencies," Jaishankar said, summing up his call for a more balanced global order and deeper India-Africa cooperation.

With PTI Inputs

- Ends