Jaishankar Raises SRIA With Rubio, Pushes UNSC Reform as India Rejects OIC on Kashmir

The news

New York and New Delhi. External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar met U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the 81st UN General Assembly on Wednesday, September 23, in what The Indian Express calls the first official discussion between the two capitals since President Trump signed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act (SRIA) on Friday. New since this magazine’s September 18 and 21 cards is India’s direct protest. Mr. Jaishankar posted that he had “reiterated India’s interests and concerns with regard to SRIA”. The law provides for tariffs of up to 100% on countries that buy Russian oil and extends sanctions on Iran trade; The Hindu says it could hit India after a stipulated one-month period. These are secondary sanctions: penalties on third countries for trading with a target. The papers differ on the stake: The Hindu says Russian Urals crude “currently makes up 51%” of India’s crude imports, while ET reports India bought 2.08 million barrels a day from Russia in August, 45% of the total. Mr. Rubio sidestepped the issue, posting that the two were “building on the U.S.-India strategic partnership”; he visits India next month. Trump–Modi meetings are being prepared, possibly at the ASEAN Summit in November and at the G20 Mr. Trump hosts in Miami in mid-December; for a third year, India has not hosted the Quad summit. On Tuesday, chairing a High-Level Meeting of Like-Minded Global South Countries and Friends, Mr. Jaishankar said the Global South is “in the front row of the global crises, but is in the back row of decision-making”, urged it to “not accept or legitimise” chokepoints in supply chains, finance or connectivity, and said energy availability and prices “should not be manipulated for political ends.” G4 Foreign Ministers — India, Brazil, Germany and Japan — met on a more representative Security Council. On Wednesday the MEA “categorically rejected” references to Jammu and Kashmir by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation’s Contact Group on J&K, whose communique called India’s May 2025 strikes on terror targets in Pakistan “unlawful”. The Hindu lists the group as Azerbaijan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Türkiye; the Express also names Niger. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had raised Kashmir at the UNGA on Tuesday. “The OIC has no locus standi to pronounce on matters that are strictly internal to India,” the MEA said. The syllabus link is GS2 on India–U.S. relations, global groupings and the UN.

Static syllabus linkage

1. Secondary sanctions reach third countries, and CAATSA is the precedent India has already navigated. Primary sanctions bar a country’s own citizens and firms from dealing with a target; secondary sanctions penalise third-country entities that deal with the target, usually by cutting them off from the sanctioning country’s market or financial system. India has consistently said it is bound only by sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council, which acts under Article 41 of the Charter for measures not involving armed force. The U.S. Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, 2017 (CAATSA), through Section 231, targets significant transactions with Russia’s defence and intelligence sectors. The U.S. used it against Türkiye in December 2020 over its S-400 purchase, but did not act against India despite India’s 2018 contract for the same system. SRIA goes further by linking a country’s access to the U.S. market, through tariffs, to its energy purchases.
2. Security Council reform needs a Charter amendment that the five permanent members can block. Article 23 of the UN Charter fixes the Security Council at 15 members: five permanent members and ten non-permanent members elected for two-year terms. It has been enlarged only once, from 11 to 15 members, by an amendment that came into force in 1965. Under Article 108, any amendment must be adopted by two-thirds of the General Assembly and ratified by two-thirds of UN members, including all five permanent members, giving each of them a veto over reform. Since 2009, reform has been discussed in the Intergovernmental Negotiations (IGN) in the General Assembly, which still work without an agreed negotiating text. India has served eight terms as a non-permanent member, most recently in 2021–22.
3. Three blocs define the reform debate: the G4, Uniting for Consensus and the African Union. The G4 — India, Brazil, Germany and Japan — formed in 2004 to support each other’s bids for permanent seats and to expand both categories of membership. Uniting for Consensus, a group led by Italy and including Pakistan, Argentina, Mexico and South Korea, opposes new permanent seats and proposes longer-term non-permanent seats instead. The African Union’s Ezulwini Consensus of 2005 demands at least two permanent seats for Africa with all the privileges of current members, including the veto, and five non-permanent seats. The G4’s 2005 draft offered that new permanent members would not exercise the veto until a review fifteen years later, a flexibility that separates it from the African position.
4. The OIC speaks for 57 states, and India denies it any role on Kashmir. The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation was founded in 1969 at a summit in Rabat after an arson attack on the Al-Aqsa mosque, and is headquartered in Jeddah; with 57 member states it is the second-largest intergovernmental organisation after the UN. Its Contact Group on Jammu and Kashmir, set up in the 1990s, issues statements that Pakistan uses to internationalise the issue. India is not a member, though it was invited as guest of honour to the OIC Council of Foreign Ministers in Abu Dhabi in 2019. India’s position rests on the Simla Agreement of 1972, which commits India and Pakistan to settle differences bilaterally, and on the changes of August 2019, when Article 370 ceased to operate and the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act, 2019 created the Union Territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh; the Supreme Court upheld the abrogation of Article 370 in December 2023.

Why UPSC loves this

1. GS2 lists international institutions, their structure and mandate. Mains has asked candidates to discuss the impediments India faces in its pursuit of a permanent seat on the Security Council. Article 108, the IGN and the positions of the G4, Uniting for Consensus and the African Union are the core of any such answer, and the G4 meeting in New York refreshes them.
2. India–U.S. relations are examined through the lens of sanctions and strategic autonomy. The CAATSA episode over the S-400 became a standard example in answers on India’s strategic autonomy. SRIA, which ties energy purchases to tariffs on exports, is the sharper sequel, and an examiner can frame it as a question on economic coercion or on India’s energy security.
3. Prelims asks about memberships and groupings. Who is in the G4, who leads Uniting for Consensus, whether India is an OIC member and where the OIC is headquartered are classic Prelims formats. The two papers’ different lists of the Contact Group are a reminder to rely on the permanent facts, not a day’s reporting.

Analysis

1. SRIA makes India’s exporters pay for its refiners’ choices, which is what makes it coercive. A tariff on India’s exports to the U.S. as a penalty for buying Russian oil does not fall on the refiners who gain from discounted crude; it falls on textile, gem and engineering exporters who have nothing to do with oil. That mismatch is the point of the design: it creates a domestic lobby for compliance. The Hindu says the law “mandates” the President to act while the Express says it “empowers” him, and the difference matters, because discretion is what India can negotiate over during the one-month window and Mr. Rubio’s visit. India’s record, as this magazine noted on September 19, is to trim purchases quietly when sanctions bite and return when they ease. Expect that pattern, not a public break.
2. The 45% versus 51% gap measures what compliance would now cost. ET puts Russia’s share at 45% in August; The Hindu says 51% “currently”. Either way, Russian crude has grown precisely because Hormuz is blockaded and the Red Sea route is under Houthi threat, as ET notes the same day. A sanctions law that penalises Russian oil at the moment Gulf supply is choked asks India to pay twice — once in lost discounts and once in scarce replacements. That is the substance of India’s warning about “implications” for the international energy market. The counter-view from Washington, voiced by State Department spokesperson Thomas Pigott (PTI, in the Express), is that countries supporting Russia’s war effort should ask whether they are “actually making the situation worse”; India’s reply is that energy security for 1.4 billion people is not a lever it can hand to another capital.
3. The “chokepoints” line is aimed at Washington and Beijing alike. When Mr. Jaishankar asked the Global South to “not accept or legitimise” chokepoints in supply chains, finance or connectivity, each word had a target: China’s rare-earth controls, the dollar-based sanctions system, and closures of straits. Framing all three as one problem lets India lead the Global South without choosing a camp, and pairs naturally with the line that energy prices “should not be manipulated for political ends”. The honest counter-view is that India has itself used export curbs — on wheat in 2022 and non-basmati white rice in 2023 — that importing countries described in similar terms. India’s credibility as the Global South’s voice depends on accepting that the principle binds it too.
4. UNSC reform is stuck on the arithmetic of Article 108, not on the weakness of India’s case. The G4 meets every September and every September the IGN produces no negotiating text, because any change needs all five permanent members to ratify and Uniting for Consensus, including Pakistan, works to prevent a text from emerging. China has never endorsed permanent seats for India or Japan. India’s practical route is to align with Africa’s Ezulwini demand, since a reform that ignores 54 African states cannot pass, and to press for text-based negotiations that expose who is blocking. The counter-view is that India should settle for a longer-term or semi-permanent seat now; the risk is that an interim formula becomes permanent, which is exactly what Uniting for Consensus wants.
5. Rejecting the OIC is routine, but Saudi Arabia’s name on the list is the real signal. Contact Group communiques on Kashmir are an annual ritual, and India’s rejection is equally ritual. What deserves attention is the content — calling India’s May 2025 strikes on terror targets “unlawful” — and the membership, which includes Saudi Arabia, a close partner, and Türkiye, whose President raised Kashmir in his UNGA address on Tuesday, the day the group met. The MEA’s line that such statements raise “serious questions on the credibility of OIC” signals a harder tone than the old formula of simple rejection. The counter-view is that over-reacting gives the communique publicity it would otherwise not get. The sound approach is to keep bilateral ties with Gulf states insulated from OIC boilerplate while answering each statement briefly and firmly.

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