Over more than three decades in the Indian Foreign Service, I served in Indian missions across the world – from Brussels to Dhaka and Mexico City to Paris and Manila, and subsequently as India’s Ambassador to Mongolia, Hungary and Bosnia & Herzegovina, and as High Commissioner in the Caribbean. As part of my career, I sat on the Executive Board of UNESCO, to gaze at the functioning of the multilateral machinery from within. This unique vantage teaches a lesson the chancelleries prefer to avoid. An institution is best judged by its conduct where scrutiny is the deepest and thinnest, rather than by the language of its charter and the public pronouncements.

The United Nations, seen from the capitals outside looks generous and lofty with declarations has indeed decayed to the core and has reached its nadir. I have come to a conclusion many of my former colleagues still flinch from stating: the organisation has outlived the world that founded it and needs to be demolished.

Just a few days ago the Commission appointed by the UN Human Rights Council has delivered its latest report on Gaza, finding reasonable grounds to conclude that Israel has committed atrocities against Palestinian children accusing some of the senior figures in the government. Observing from the developing world, the selectivity is impossible to miss. This is not a judgment on how Israel has fought its war, a matter on which there are many honest differences. The question is why Israel alone was singled out. In those same years, comparable or larger civilian tolls in Syria, Yemen and Sudan drew no attention of the Council. Are the human sufferings in one place are different from the other?

The proof lies in the architecture of the UN system. The Security Council remains frozen around the five powers that won a war concluded eighty years ago. The fate of conflicts and human sufferings in Africa or........

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