New Delhi: India formally launched its campaign for a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council (UNSC) this week, but another pillar of its presence in the UN system is quietly set to disappear.With the deadline for nominations to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) now over, New Delhi has not put forward a candidate to succeed Judge Dalveer Bhandari, marking the end of India’s 14-year run on the world court, cemented by Bhandari’s 2017 re-election, celebrated at the time in New Delhi as a diplomatic triumph and evidence of its Global South leadership.That unheralded exit comes even as external affairs minister S. Jaishankar was in New York on Monday to launch India’s campaign for a non-permanent Security Council seat for the 2028-29 term. Speaking at UN headquarters, he outlined India’s priorities for the campaign, including its peacekeeping record and long-standing commitment to multilateralism.A couple of weeks before India launched its UNSC campaign, UN Secretary-General António Guterres, as per procedure, circulated a memorandum and an accompanying note to formally set in motion the election of five judges to the ICJ for a nine-year term beginning in February 2027. Also read: What is India Doing to Protect and Reinforce International Law?The memorandum recorded that national groups attached to the Permanent Court of Arbitration had been given four and a half months, until June 24, to file their nominations. The note carried the final list of candidates who were nominated before the deadline. India is absent from that list.Judge Dalveer Bhandari of the International Court of Justice. Photo: Facebook.With nominations now closed, India cannot enter the race. Unless an unforeseen vacancy arises, Bhandari’s retirement next February will leave India without a judge on the UN’s top judicial body for the first time since 2012.India’s retreat from the ICJ also comes as its presence across the UN’s other top legal bodies is narrowing. Bimal Patel, the international law scholar India elected to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) in June, is set to give up his seat on the International Law Commission once he takes up the ITLOS post on October 1.India will then hold only its ITLOS seat among the three bodies it has traditionally prioritised, a departure from a pattern it has maintained since at least the mid-2010s, when it held seats on all three simultaneously. The next scheduled opportunity to contest an ICJ seat is 2029, but that cycle offers no real opening either. Asia’s only two seats up that year are both held by sitting judges likely to seek re-election – Iwasawa Yuji of Japan, the court’s president, and Xue Hanqin of China.Neither Tokyo nor Beijing has yet declared a re-election bid, but sitting judges, especially a P5 incumbent and a sitting court president, rarely decline another term.There has been no public explanation as to why India has chosen not to contest the election.The road not takenThe Wire has learnt that a former chief justice of India had been a favourite in certain quarters to replace Bhandari as India’s candidate. He had even been sounded out at one stage, even as there was grapevine talk of informal lobbying among other sitting and former Supreme Court judges. But sources said there was reluctance at the highest levels of South Block to contest major international elections at this time. That caution stood out against the backdrop of Bimal Patel’s Patel’s election to the ITLOS in June, in which victory was secured in the second pole position with 115 votes after Vietnam. Last time, India’s Neeru Chadha had topped the Asia Pacific group in first round with 120 votes.The case for a seat on the ICJ in 2017 was sharpened by a live dispute, India’s challenge to Pakistan over Kulbhushan Jadhav’s death sentence, which gave New Delhi a direct stake in who sat on the bench. No comparable case is before the court today. But one former Indian diplomat argued the reasoning runs deeper. “If your aspiration is to be an important player, then you have to be in seats where it matters,” he said.But with 10 candidates in the fray for five vacancies, New Delhi may also have been reluctant to commit the diplomatic resources required for a campaign whose outcome was uncertain, while simultaneously preparing its campaign for the Security Council.The Security Council race aheadThe path to the horseshoe table itself, especially, is unlikely to be straightforward. Unlike when it was elected unopposed last time, India faces competition for the Asia-Pacific seat from Tajikistan, whose candidature secured the backing of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, a bloc with 56 votes in the General Assembly, in 2022.Security Council contests are harder to read than most UN elections precisely because the bigger powers rarely trade votes on them the way smaller states do on lesser bodies, as per a former Indian diplomat. Smaller countries often exchange support across unrelated elections, but Council seats are treated as matters of international peace and security rather than currency to be bargained away, which makes early endorsement counts a weaker predictor of the final outcome.The recently concluded Security Council election underlined that unpredictability. Kyrgyzstan, a first-time candidate, defeated the Philippines for the Asia-Pacific seat, a result many observers attributed to Manila’s close alignment with the Trump administration. Germany also unexpectedly failed to secure election, with Berlin’s position on Israel during Gaza war widely seen as having cost it support.Courting the Global SouthIt was therefore notable that, in launching India’s campaign on Monday, Jaishankar was at pains to foreground something its government has been reluctant to highlight: New Delhi’s formal support for Palestine. India is one of a handful of countries that sold munitions to Israel during its Gaza war, despite the evidence that Tel Aviv was committing war crimes and even genocide. In stark contrast to another Global South power like South Africa, which charged Israel with genocide in a case filed at the ICJ, India is seen as a backer of Israel, with Narendra Modi embracing Benjamin Netanyahu in a visit to his country days before Israel’s attack on Iran. In his remarks at the UN, however, Jaishankar sought to shift global attention away from that record, speaking instead of India’s support for the two-state solution (in which an independent Palestine would co-exist with Israel). He also pointed out that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) had recognised India as its “top emerging donor”, and announced additional assistance, including a specialty hospital, an artificial limb fitment centre and a vocational training institute for Palestine.Jaishankar’s speech also repeatedly positioned India as a voice of the Global South. He cited the Voice of Global South Summits held virtually, India’s role in securing the African Union’s admission to the G20 and development partnerships across more than 100 countries, saying India would “present the concerns of the Global South on international peace and security before the Security Council.”India’s decision not to contest the ICJ election this year stands in contrast to the significance New Delhi attached to Bhandari’s victory in 2017.The victory was widely portrayed by the Indian government – and in reams of columns – as reflecting the support of the General Assembly, dominated by developing countries, against the preferences of the Security Council’s permanent members. In his book recounting the ins and outs of the campaign, India’s then permanent representative to the United Nations, Syed Akbaruddin, argued that the election had come to symbolise more than the fate of two candidates. He described Bhandari’s victory as the “coming-of-age of Indian multilateral diplomacy”.Jaishankar, who was then foreign secretary, had said in 2018 that the victory “could not have been achieved without the full support and solidarity of the African countries.”Even as New Delhi courts support from the Global South for its Security Council bid, it has chosen not to test whether that support could once again be translated into an ICJ victory.The argument for not contesting the ICJ was also due to its unique difficulty, since majority must be secured in both the 15-member UNSC and the 193-member UNGA. Campaigns are typically mounted years in advance, and governments begin seeking commitments well before the formal nomination process, building reciprocal understandings with other countries and securing nominations from national groups attached to the Permanent Court of Arbitration across different regions.How India won it last timeYet India itself demonstrated in 2017 that a late start was an uphill task, but not necessarily fatal.The Modi government spent months debating whether to seek another term for Bhandari, nominate another candidate or relinquish the seat altogether, with several sitting judges reportedly among the names considered.It had already launched successful campaigns in the months before the 2017 deadline for the ITLOS and the International Law Commission. But, India finally decided to move in the last month before the deadline, with nomination papers filed just a fortnight before the July 3 deadline.Despite entering the race late, India mounted one of its most intensive diplomatic campaigns for a multilateral election. Prime Minister Narendra Modi raised Bhandari’s candidature in meetings with foreign leaders. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj lobbied counterparts during the UN General Assembly’s high-level week. Indian missions across the world were instructed to seek support in capitals, while South Block also considered dispatching special envoys to key countries to garner backing.The eventual outcome, however, was shaped by an unexpected turn in the election. Bhandari had originally been expected to contest what was informally regarded as the Asia-Pacific seat against Lebanon’s Nawaf Salam, whose candidature had been announced nearly two years earlier. Salam, then Lebanon’s permanent representative to the United Nations and now Lebanon’s prime minister, secured election in the first round.Instead, the election departed from the usual pattern of informal regional rotation. Britain’s Christopher Greenwood, who had been expected to retain the Western European seat, failed to secure the required majority in the General Assembly despite winning the backing of the Security Council. That left Bhandari and Greenwood competing for the fifth and final vacancy in an unprecedented contest.As successive rounds of voting failed to produce a common winner between the two, the split between the UN’s two principal organs became increasingly stark. The General Assembly repeatedly gave Bhandari a comfortable majority, while the Security Council consistently backed Greenwood. After days of deadlock, Britain withdrew Greenwood’s candidature, paving the way for Bhandari’s re-election. It marked the first time since the International Court of Justice was established in 1946 that the United Kingdom no longer had a judge on the bench, breaking the long-standing convention under which all five permanent members of the Security Council were simultaneously represented on the court.Reading the numbersThis year’s election follows a different configuration. Three Asian candidates, Singapore’s Rena Lee, South Korea’s Paik Jin-hyun and Jordan’s Mahmoud Hmoud, are among the ten nominees for the five vacancies.As with Salam in 2017, several of this year’s candidates declared their intentions to run well over two years before the nomination window closed. That early start appears to have paid off in the breadth of support these candidates drew. UK’s Dapo Akande leads the field with the backing of 43 national groups, followed by France’s François Alabrune with 40, Singapore’s Rena Lee with 33, Kenya’s Phoebe Okowa with 26 and South Korea’s Paik Jin-hyun with 21. At the same time, endorsement counts are, however, an imperfect proxy for eventual support, since many countries that never issue a formal national-group nomination still vote in the General Assembly.For New Delhi, the arithmetic would have looked considerably more daunting than in 2017.Jordan’s Hmoud, the incumbent among the three Asian candidates, was widely expected to hold his seat, since officials said incumbents standing for re-election usually win. Had India contested, it would have been a third candidate, alongside Singapore’s Lee and South Korea’s Paik, chasing what was effectively one open seat.Incumbents don’t always win, as Bhandari proved against Greenwood in 2017. The fear this time was that his win then was the exception, not the rule.