External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Monday said the United Nations had become “largely irrelevant” to decision-making on major global crises, including the conflicts in the Gulf and Ukraine, and called for urgent reforms to make the multilateral body representative of the changing world.Speaking at the Kautilya Economic Conclave in New Delhi, Jaishankar said the UN was “gridlocked” and that the inability of the Security Council to act had fuelled the perception that the global body no longer reflected the interests of the wider international community.“Where the UN is concerned, I think it’s obvious to everybody by now that the UN is gridlocked. If you look at the big issues of the day, whether you look at the conflict in the Gulf, whether you look at the conflict in Ukraine, whether you look at other issues in Africa, whether you look at Covid, actually, the United Nations has been largely irrelevant to the decision-making,” he said.Jaishankar said there was now a widely held view that the Security Council was not only gridlocked but also failed to represent the entirety of global interests.He pointed to the dramatic expansion in UN membership since its creation to underline the mismatch between the organisation’s present structure and the world it is expected to represent.“When the UN started, there were 51 countries. Today, there are almost four times that number,” he said, drawing an analogy with an organisation that had expanded fourfold but continued with the same board of management.“If you have grown four times and you want to keep the old board of management, it’s not going to work,” he said.Jaishankar also rejected arguments against reforms that invoke the interests of Africa, saying African countries themselves had clearly articulated their position in the intergovernmental negotiations on UN reform.“There are some countries who are resisting reform and they will say, ‘Oh, but we are doing it in the interest of Africa’,” he said. “Africa has a very clear position on this. Africa has actually laid out what it wants.”He stressed that India’s objective should not be to abandon the UN or create alternatives to it but to make the existing multilateral system more effective.“We need the UN…Our job must be to fix the UN, not to work around the UN,” Jaishankar said.His remarks come amid a wider debate over the effectiveness of multilateral institutions as geopolitical tensions, conflicts and economic fragmentation have intensified. The UN Security Council, in particular, has faced repeated deadlocks over major international crises.Jaishankar’s comments also formed part of his broader assessment of a rapidly changing global order, which he described as an “age of flux”, marked by the rise of new powers, weakening of old alignments and a shift towards a more multipolar world.He said the changing balance of power required India to maintain relationships with multiple major powers simultaneously rather than view its foreign-policy choices through a zero-sum lens.The External Affairs Minister said the rise of China, the continuing importance of the US, India’s longstanding relationship with Russia and its growing engagement with Europe were all part of the new geopolitical reality.He also underlined the importance of India continuing to articulate the concerns of the Global South, particularly on issues such as food, fuel, fertiliser and finance that have been aggravated by conflicts and disruptions in the global economy.The UN reform argument, he suggested, was, therefore, not about weakening multilateralism but about making it work in a world that has changed substantially since the organisation was established.“The world has changed,” Jaishankar said, arguing that institutions created for an earlier distribution of global power could not indefinitely remain unchanged while their membership and the nature of global challenges had expanded dramatically.