Mexico, India, Ireland and Norway were elected to the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday, but the 193 U.N. member states must return on Thursday to continue voting to fill one more vacant seat after there was no clear winner.
Mexico and India were elected unopposed.
India garnered 184 votes out of the 192 ballots cast in the General Assembly. India’s two-year term on the 15-member council will begin on January 1, 2021.
This is the eighth time that India will sit at the UN high-table, which comprises five permanent members and 10 non-permanent members.
Canada lost out to Ireland and Norway in a hotly contested election that included Ireland enlisting the help of U2 singer Bono and taking U.N. ambassadors to a U2 concert and Canada taking envoys to a Celine Dion concert.
Kenya and Djibouti were competing for the final seat, but there was no clear winner.
To ensure geographical representation, seats are allocated to regional groups. But even if candidates are running unopposed in their group, they still need to win the support of more than two thirds of the U.N. General Assembly.
After operating virtually since March amid the coronavirus pandemic, diplomats - wearing masks and social distancing - returned to the General Assembly hall on Wednesday to cast their secret ballots at allotted times.
They also elected - unopposed - Turkish diplomat Volkan Bozkir as the president of the 75th session of the U.N. General Assembly. He will take up the role later this year.
The Security Council is the only U.N. body that can make legally binding decisions like imposing sanctions and authorising the use of force. It has five permanent veto-wielding members - the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia.
In 2021, India, Norway, Ireland and Mexico will sit in the most powerful UN organ along with the five permanent members as well as non-permanent members Estonia, Niger, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Tunisia and Vietnam.
The two-year terms of Belgium, Dominican Republic, Germany, Indonesia and South Africa are ending this year.
Immediately after the results were announced, India’s Permanent Representative to the UN Ambassador TS Tirumurti said in a video statement that he is truly delighted that India has been elected as a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council for 2021-22.
“We have received overwhelming support and I’m deeply humbled by the tremendous confidence, which the member states of the United Nations have reposed in India,” he said.
(With inputs from Reuters and Press Trust of India)