Should India withdraw its troops from UN peacekeeping forces? In a thought-provoking op-ed in these pages, Nitin Pai and Sushant Singh, argue, for a number of reasons, that India should scale down its participation in UN peacekeeping operations. The authors deserve to be complimented for starting a debate on an issue that’s considered the founding principle for deployment of the military on foreign soil. Indeed, the internalisation of operating under the ‘blue-helmet’ concept is so strong within the military, that few imagine operating outside our borders without UN authorisation. For instance, in the debate on whether to deploy Indian troops in Iraq, after the fall of Saddam Hussein, one of the key demands was to do so under a UN mandate. However, before coming to hasty conclusions about the utility of participating in UN ops, we need to consider what’s at stake here

First, the authors find it hard to justify the death of Indian peacekeepers in the ‘service of an ideal’. On the contrary, an ideal justifies everything — from fighting for one’s country, exposing corruption in the badlands of Bihar or dying to bring peace in the Congo. It was to ‘serve an ideal’ that our forefathers fought for our freedom against colonial oppression. India’s participation in peacekeeping operations began under an ideal that was propagated by Nehru and earned it global goodwill with the conduct of the Indian army in Korea, Gaza and in numerous missions in Africa. If there are no ideals to serve, then no cause is worth fighting and dying for.

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