Will this man be the UN Secretary General?

An exclusive interview!

United Nations Under Secretary General Shashi Tharoor has been named as India's candidate for the post of secretary general when the term of current incumbent Kofi Annan expires in December.

Since January 2001, Dr Tharoor has been in charge of the department of communications and public information, one of the largest departments at the UN secretariat, with some 750 staff and field offices in 63 countries.

Dr Tharoor accepted what was initially a temporary assignment as interim head of the much-criticised department, then stayed on to oversee a reform process that sought to streamline and professionalise what was seen as an ineffective and bureaucratic department.

In fact, his biggest victory in the post he currently occupies is that he became the first and thus far, only, secretariat leader to succeed in closing down UN offices in pursuit of the goal of streamlining its functioning. He accomplished this by shutting down eight UN information centres in Western Europe in the face of considerable political and bureaucratic opposition.

Prior to this assignment, he served as director of communications and special projects in the office of the secretary general (1997-2001), and as a senior advisor to the secretary general.

Before that, he was special assistant to the under secretary general for peacekeeping operations (1989-1996), an assignment that saw him lead the team in the department of peacekeeping operations responsible for UN peacekeeping operations in what was then Yugoslavia; and working with two successive heads of United Nations peacekeeping operations in managing peacekeeping activities at the end of the Cold War.

While all these assignments based him at the New York headquarters of the United Nations, his career with the world body began in 1978, on the staff of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva. He was head of the UNHCR office in Singapore (1981-1984) during the peak of the Vietnamese 'boat people' crisis.

Somewhere along the way, he also found time to write nine books, including the acclaimed India: From Midnight to the Millennium and a biography of Jawaharlal Nehru, as well as articles in a wide range of publications including the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, International Herald Tribune and Newsweek.

The holder of a PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, USA, where he received the Robert B Stewart Prize for Best Student, he was named 'Global Leader of Tomorrow' in January 1998 by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Awards include a Commonwealth Writers' Prize; he was named to India's highest honour for Overseas Indians, the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, in 2004.

Dr Tharoor spoke to Managing Editor Prem Panicker in New York almost immediately after India's announcement of his candidature for the top post.

The Government of India has officially nominated you as its candidate for the post of secretary general -- but that is just the first step, right? What next -- do you have to campaign for election, in some fashion?

It does become a bit complicated, in the sense that it is the kind of post for which traditionally people have not campaigned very much. There hasn't been much campaigning for this post in the past. And I have a job to do here already.

But the truth is that the current candidates who are already in the race have been campaigning quite a lot already, so there is no doubt that one would have to do at least a little bit to make the case for oneself with member States.

What form will this campaigning take for you personally? Is it passive in the sense of merely making yourself available to interested parties so they can quiz you on your thoughts and your agenda, or is there an active component to it?

As far as possible I aim to do my normal work at the UN, while giving interviews and meeting government officials as appropriate. But if I need to visit a capital, I would of course take leave from my job for the time needed.

There is reportedly an unwritten coda that the post goes by rotation and that it is now the turn of Asia to hold it. Does that hold good?

It is an unofficial rotation, in the sense that the Security Council has a free hand to pick whoever they want to pick, from any of the member nations, and recommend that name to the Assembly. But in the last three or four elections, a pattern has developed that the post rotates.

Of the first four secretaries, three were European (the other being an Asian, Burma's U Thant, 1961-1971) -- but after the last one of those, Mr (Kurt) Waldheim (1972-1981), there has been Latin American (Javier Perez de Cuellar of Peru, who held office between 1982-1991) and two Africans (Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt, 1992-1996 and the incumbent, Kofi Annan, 1997-2006), and so now it is time for an Asian again.

It is admittedly an unwritten convention, but the Asian groups and the African groups have both announced that they feel very strongly that it should be Asia's turn this year, and so while there is no question in anybody's mind that the UNSC is free to pick any candidate, it is widely believed that it would be Asia that would produce the winning horse.