The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Q & A / SHASHI THAROOR, United Nations undersecretary-general:
'The U.S. needs the U.N.' at many levels
Moni Basu - Staff
Wednesday, December 3, 2003

Shashi Tharoor speaks with just as much ease about Bollywood, the Indian film capital, as he does about Bosnia.

That's because Tharoor wrote a book about the Indian film industry even as he was overseeing the United Nations' peacekeeping mission in the former Yugoslavia.

Tharoor, undersecretary-general for communications and public information at the United Nations, is an international diplomat by day, author by night. He began his U.N. career in 1978 with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, climbing the ranks to his current position under Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

Still, Tharoor ekes out time to write, the "other passion" in his life. His latest book, "Nehru: The Invention of India," is a biography of India's first prime minister.

Tharoor is scheduled to read from the book Saturday in Atlanta. He spoke by phone recently with Journal-Constitution reporter Moni Basu (mbasu@ajc.com). Here are excerpts from the interview:

Q: Why did you choose to write a biography of Jawarhalal Nehru?

A: The last time I wrote about India in any extended length was in my book "India: From Midnight to the Millennium," in which I looked at the 50 years after independence and took very much a focus on contemporary India. Looking at Nehru's life gave me an opportunity to go further back as well as to ask the question: What has happened to Nehru's legacy today?

Q: What do you think India --- and the world --- today could learn from a man like Nehru?

A: I would parse his legacy into four major things for India.

One is democratic institution building, which is quite astonishing because the vast majority of nationalist leaders who came to power in the formerly colonized countries turned their societies into various degrees of autocracy and dictatorship.

A second pillar, considerably less positive, was his socialistic economics, putting bureaucrats instead of businesspeople in charge of the economy. [It] failed colossally.

The third pillar was the nonaligned foreign policy of Nehru. It gave India, a relatively modest military power, a greater voice in world affairs.

The fourth is the legacy of secularism, which is so necessary to India's viability as a pluralistic state. I believe passionately that pluralism is as integral to India's identity as democracy is to America's identity.

All these four pillars of Nehruvianism are part of the answers that people around the world have been trying to come up with to the great dilemmas of our times. Many countries turned away from democracy, saying bread is more important than freedom. Nehru tried to demonstrate you can have both bread and freedom.

Q: How did the war in Iraq change perceptions of the United Nations?

A: There was a Pew poll conducted in the summer of 20 countries that actually showed that our image had gone down in all 20. It had gone down in the U.S. because the U.N. did not support the U.S. war on Iraq and it went down in the other 19 countries because the U.N. had failed to prevent the war. So that was not a happy moment for us.

But we think some of this is transient. And ultimately one of the interesting developments out of all of this is the extraordinary amount of attention focused on the United Nations even if it has been negative attention at times. That has given us an opportunity to talk about what the institution stands for at a time when people are paying attention.

Q: What are you doing to improve the image of the U.N.?

A: We are making the point that after the war, everyone has come back to the U.N. Secondly, we are trying to come to grips with the world of the 21st century.

Q: Do you believe the internal structure of the U.N. needs to change?

A: There are various institutional issues that have come up but perhaps the best known is the question of the composition of the Security Council. When the U.N. was established back in 1945, we had 11 Security Council members out of a total U.N. membership of 51, which is about 22 percent. Today we have 15 out of 191, which is less than 8 percent.

So an awful lot of countries don't feel properly represented. Then we have other anomalies like the fact that Europe, with 5 percent of the world's population, has 33 percent of the seats on the council. Then you've got the issue of the permanent members of the council, which really is a snapshot of the geopolitical realities of 1945. We have major countries such as Japan and Germany, which are now the second and third largest contributors to the U.N., who are not permanent members and are, indeed, referred to in the charter as enemy states to this day.

And you have other countries in the South --- countries like India, Brazil, Nigeria, South Africa, Indonesia, big countries that have large populations and enormous influence in their regions --- feeling they, too, need to have more of a voice in world affairs.

Q: What's the importance of the U.N. today?

A: The world is full of problems that Kofi Annan likes to call "problems without passports," the kind of problems that cross frontiers uninvited. Those range from problems of refugee movements, human rights issues, war and peace obviously, drug abuse and drug control, money laundering, poverty and development.

No one can expect the U.S. alone to handle all these problems. You need a world institution that leverages the power and influences and collective will and resources of all countries to make this work. And that's what the U.N. is.

Q: What's your best argument for why the U.S. should keep working with the U.N.?

A: The U.S. needs the U.N. at a whole lot of different levels. It needs the U.N. to help promote its own national interests. One example of that is the tragic aftermath of 9/11. The U.S. came to the Security Council and got . . . every country in the world to update its anti-terrorism legislation, to freeze financial flows and arms transfers among suspected terrorist groups and report the movements of suspected terrorists and so on. It was something that, frankly, would have taken years, if not decades, to negotiate with 191 countries [individually].

MEET THE AUTHOR
Who: Shashi Tharoor, U.N. undersecretary-general for communications and public information.
What: Tharoor reads from his latest book, "Nehru: The Invention of India." A reception follows.
When: 7 p.m. Saturday.
Where: Tull Auditorium, Emory University law school, 1301 Clifton Road.
Cost: Free. For more information, contact Neha Shah, Atlanta coordinator of the South Asian Journalists Association, at 404-885-4579 or by e-mail at Neha .Shah@Turner.com.