The United Nations has outlived its usefulness. What began as a noble experiment in 1945 to prevent another world war has devolved into an ineffective, expensive, and increasingly authoritarian body that serves the interests of dictatorships while betraying its founding principles. Recent discussions around restricting media freedom, combined with the organisation’s fundamental structural flaws and demonstrated failures, make clear that it is time to consign this World War II relic to history.

The UN was conceived in the context of World War II, and its structure reflects the victors’ priorities from 80 years ago. The Security Council’s five permanent members—the United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China—were chosen based on who emerged triumphant in 1945, not on current global realities.

This explains why economic powerhouses like Germany and Japan, despite being the world’s third and fourth-largest economies, lack permanent seats. India, the world’s most populous nation with 1.4 billion people and the world’s fastest-growing major economy, was excluded due to Nehru’s misguided policy that prioritised ideological purity over practical influence. Rather than continuing to lobby for inclusion in this fundamentally flawed and exclusionary system, India and other nations must recognize that the Security Council’s design itself is irredeemably broken and the entire structure needs to be dismantled.

The world has changed dramatically since 1945, but the UN’s power structure remains locked in a bygone era when colonial empires still existed and nuclear weapons were in their infancy.

The General Assembly’s “one country, one vote" system represents perhaps the most democratically perverse arrangement in international relations. An Indian citizen’s vote carries 1/2,800,000th the weight of a Vatican citizen’s vote in UN deliberations. Tuvalu’s 12,000 residents have the same institutional voice as the world’s most populous nation with its 1.4 billion people. This means countries like Nauru (10,000 people), San Marino (34,000), and Palau (18,000) wield identical voting power to nations with hundreds of millions of citizens.

In any genuine democratic system, representation would be proportional to population. Instead, the UN has created a system where micro-states can form coalitions to outvote countries representing billions of people. This isn’t democracy—it’s a parody of representation that makes a mockery of the principle of democratic rights.

The UN Human Rights Council exemplifies how the organisation has become a shield for the world’s........

© News18