India should join the UN Refugee Convention on its 75th anniversary

India prides itself on being a steward of international law. As the world’s largest democracy and the world’s third-largest economy (in terms of purchasing power parity), what India does on the world stage matters. Indians are right to resent that the United Nations continues to treat India as a second-class country. Given India’s presence on the world stage, it deserves to be a permanent UN Security Council member state more than the United Kingdom and France, both shadows of their former colonial past.

While Indians voice frustration at the lack of UN reform and the disrespect their exclusion from the Security Council represents, New Delhi’s failure to sign on to the UN Refugee Convention undermines its moral authority in the institution.

As the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) today prepares to mark the 75th anniversary of the Refugee Convention on 24 July, it seeks to add to the 146 states that are signatories. India is the largest state not to join, but it is hardly the only one: other South Asian states like Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka also remain outside the Convention. So too do many West Asian states, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates among them, and many Southeast Asian states, including Myanmar, Thailand, and Indonesia.

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Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s decision not to sign the Convention rested on his belief that membership of the Convention might undercut India’s sovereignty and encourage destabilising refugee flows. Yet even states that traditionally take a prickly approach to sovereignty — the People’s Republic of China, Russia and Iran — are members.

Nehru’s doubt about India’s need for UNHCR had some basis; after all, just four years before the Convention, India successfully settled eight million refugees fleeing from Pakistan or what is now Bangladesh into India. The belief that UNHCR membership attracts refugees, though, is wrong. Bangladesh is not a Convention member, yet Rohingya Muslims flee from Myanmar’s Rakhine State into the area around the south-eastern Bangladesh town of Cox’s Bazar due to the repression of the Myanmar junta; Bangladesh’s Convention status has nothing to do with it. Likewise, refugees from West, Central, and East Africa flee into Libya, which also is not a member.

I recently visited Benghazi to talk to authorities there. Libya does not recognise any refugees per se but has agreed to allow the local UNHCR offices to register and work with specific nationalities, including Oromo Ethiopians, Eritreans, Iraqis, Somalis, Syrians, Palestinians, and Sudanese. This, of course, omits many sub-Saharan Africans who flee into Libya regardless. Absent the ability to receive UNHCR assistance, these Malians, Nigerians, and Burkinabé are subject to exploitation and tremendous human rights abuses, including enslavement in extreme cases. Alternatively, the desperation of being unregistered and unable to access basic assistance can also lead them to engage in criminality.

India does allow UNHCR to maintain offices in New Delhi and Chennai, both of which coordinate with local organisations and the government to support 2,40,000 refugees who have fled from places like Afghanistan and Myanmar.

In India, UNHCR respects sovereignty and local customs; it is not a UN agency that enters a country and seeks to impose its own social agenda. It is also an organisation that is rapidly changing for the better. While traditionally the bailiwick of Western European socialists, on 1 January 2026, Barham Salih, a Kurd and the former president of Iraq, began his tenure as High Commissioner. The fact that he was himself a refugee, the first ever to lead UNHCR, infuses a realism that the agency too often lacked in the past.

UNHCR operates on a shoestring budget but fulfils a symbiotic function for India: regularising and registering refugees and working with local authorities to protect both Indian interests and the refugees themselves. That should be a system the UN embraces.

India is a member of 15 UN specialised agencies, including the World Health Organisation, the Food and Agriculture Organisation, and the International Labour Organisation (ILO). By refusing to join the Convention, however, India risks the progress the Modi administration now enjoys, especially if any future administration seeks to undermine its precedents and policies. India also undermines not only its own authority, but its future ability to shape and mould policy internally.

India should lead, but to lead it must participate. It should distinguish itself from its neighbours, and show it remains far more committed to international law and human rights than Pakistan and Bangladesh. Time has shown the old reasons for eschewing the Refugee Convention were mistaken; New Delhi should rectify that mistake.

(Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, and a distinguished fellow at Udaipur’s Usanas Foundation. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)