Jaishankar on UN gridlock Calls for fixing the UN

Oct 5

PTI's public excerpt preserves Nand Kishore Singh's complete question about the UN's future, its founding objectives, the latest General Assembly meeting, the coming secretary-general succession and multilateral institutions, followed by Subrahmanyam Jaishankar's complete answer within this excerpt. Jaishankar says the UN is gridlocked and largely irrelevant to decisions on the Gulf and Ukraine conflicts, issues in Africa and COVID. He partly attributes this to a Security Council that no longer represents global interests, contrasting 51 founding members with nearly four times as many today. He accuses unnamed countries of using Africa's interests to block reform, while saying Africa has already articulated its position in intergovernmental negotiations. In his conclusion he qualifies irrelevance as ineffectiveness, stresses that the UN is needed and has served the international community, and calls for fixing it with its own cooperation. No obstructing countries, specific African reform terms or agreed institutional changes are identified. This is the complete recorded question and answer in the 175-second PTI publication, rather than the complete Kautilya appearance.

At the fifth Kautilya Economic Conclave in New Delhi on October 5, 2026, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar answers a question about the UN's future. Both DD India's complete conclave report and PTI's directly recorded question and answer carry his diagnosis that the UN and Security Council are gridlocked and inadequately representative, contrasting 51 founding members with nearly four times that number today. In the complete PTI answer he accuses unnamed countries of invoking Africa's interests to obstruct reform while saying Africa has already set out its negotiating position. He qualifies 'irrelevance' as ineffectiveness, stresses that the UN remains necessary and has served the international community, and says it must be fixed with its own cooperation. These are his attributed diagnoses and appeal; no obstructing state, adopted reform, new membership or voting change is established. At the October 5 UN briefing, Deepak Arora paraphrases the same membership, management and necessary-UN argument as remarks by India's foreign minister, but describes them as having occurred 'yesterday'. This relative-day discrepancy remains attributed; the directly recorded appearance and inspected PIB record date the original answer to October 5. Haq's member-led reform response is a separate bounded public response.