India Wins Caribbean Backing For Security Council Seat As It Presses Global South Cause
The 15-nation Caribbean Community has decided to support India's candidature for a non-permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council for the 2028-29 term, India's foreign ministry said, in the clearest outcome yet from a week of Global South diplomacy at the UN General Assembly.
The decision was conveyed at the India-CARICOM foreign ministers' meeting in New York on 23 September, held on the margins of the assembly's 81st session. India's external affairs minister, S Jaishankar, co-chaired it with Melvin Bouva, Suriname's minister of foreign affairs, international business and cooperation. Jaishankar thanked the group and said India would be a strong voice of the Global South.
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| Image Source: @DrSJaishankar |
Non-permanent Security Council members are elected by the General Assembly for two-year terms. India last sat on the council in 2021-22, its eighth stint, according to the Manorama Yearbook.
The CARICOM meeting was one element of a broader push. A day earlier, Jaishankar chaired a high-level ministerial meeting of what India calls like-minded Global South countries and friends, under the theme "Navigating Together Towards a Brighter Future".
In his opening remarks, he argued that institutions built for an earlier age still reflect that era's power structures. The Global South, he said, "may be in the front row of global crises, but is in the back row of decision-making". He added that at a moment when the world needed multilateralism, it was instead witnessing its dismantling, and that organisations expected to deliver solutions had become a problem to solve.
He set out seven priorities. Choke points in supply chains, finance and connectivity should not be legitimised. Energy availability and prices should not be manipulated for political ends. Food security, particularly supplies of grain and fertiliser, needed urgent attention. Trade practices should build production capacity rather than reduce developing countries to consumers, and the right to industrialise should not be denied. The maritime commons should be secured and the safety of seafarers guaranteed. Artificial intelligence should not create new divides. And the Global South should sit in the structures that decide its future.
He proposed closer economic cooperation among developing countries, the sharing of indigenously developed AI tools, and reliance on frameworks such as the International Solar Alliance and the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure rather than on the Global North alone. Participants agreed to press for UN reform and for what the ministry described as a balanced and participatory global governance architecture.
On 23 September, Jaishankar also chaired the second foreign ministers' meeting of the Forum for India-Pacific Islands Cooperation, at India's mission in New York. Ministers and senior officials from Samoa, Fiji, the Marshall Islands, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Tonga, the Federated States of Micronesia, Vanuatu and Nauru attended, along with the Pacific Islands Forum secretary general, Baron Waqa.
Reviewing commitments made at the last summit in 2023, Jaishankar said a 100-bed hospital in Fiji was progressing, haemodialysis machines had been delivered to seven countries, and 20 sea ambulances requested by 12 states should be delivered by March 2027. India had solarised 2,800 households across 14 Pacific island countries and trained 70 women as solar engineers. He acknowledged that two projects, a space technology centre in Papua New Guinea and an ocean research institute at the University of the South Pacific, had moved more slowly than anticipated.
He also said Waqa had written to inform him that India had been placed on the Pacific Islands Forum's strategic partners stream, calling it a positive development.
Earlier in the week, Jaishankar attended the first foreign ministers' meeting in a Visegrád Group-plus-India format, with Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Czechia. Slovakia's foreign minister, Juraj Blanár, said afterwards that the four countries agreed India must be at the table as a permanent member of the Security Council. The group agreed to annual ministerial meetings, a business forum and cooperation on technology and defence.
Jaishankar has also met his counterparts from France, Ecuador, Moldova, Switzerland, Estonia and Singapore, and held talks with European Union ministers on Ukraine, the Gulf and the Indo-Pacific. He is scheduled to deliver India's address to the General Assembly on 26 September.