No side either admits it or takes credit for it, but fortuitously enough, India and Pakistan often have achieved parity in terms of bureaucratic power at the United Nations in New York.
When Boutros Boutros Ghali was the Secretary General of the United Nations, some Pakistanis at the UN repeatedly voiced concern that he was too strongly influenced by then Under Secretary-General Chinmaya Garekhan, formerly India´s Permanent Representative to the UN. Similarly, years earlier, the Pakistanis were miffed that another Under Secretary-General, Virendra Dayal, had the ear of his boss, Javier Perez de Cuellar. For their part, Indian diplomats have often complained that no Indian heads a UN agency – a complaint made more competitive by the fact that one such head, Nafis Sadik, Executive Director of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), is Pakistani and has been in the position for 11 years.
On the whole, however, this kind of blinkered carping does not figure in the larger scheme of things at the United Nations in New York, where the Secretariat as well as major agencies such as UNDP (for development), UNFPA (population) and Unicef (children) are headquartered. Indeed, for all the nationalistic flag-waving that does exist even in the UN, there have been many examples of Indians and Pakistanis cooperating and rising together in the international civil service.
Indian and Pakistani diplomats alike point to the relationship between Iqbal Riza, a Pakistani, and Shashi Tharoor, an Indian, as a sign of how misguided the view of Indian-Pakistani "zero-sum" competition at the UN is. Riza and Tharoor both served under Kofi Annan when the Ghanaian diplomat headed the Department of Peacekeeping Operations. They worked closely together in handling UN peacekeeping work in Bosnia-Herzegovina. When Annan took over from Boutros-Ghali as Secretary-General at the beginning of 1997, both men rose to the Secretariat´s top ranks, with Riza taking the coveted chief-of-staff (Chef de Cabinet) role and Tharoor in a prominent advisory slot. Indians and Pakistanis have no problems getting along, says a former South Asian staffer, pointing the finger in an entirely different direction in a show of regional solidarity, "The real problem is the Latin Americans always trying to get the top posts for their region." (The rise of the Latino in the United Nations Secretariat harks back to the period of Boutros Boutros- Ghali´s successor, Peruvian Javier Perez de Cuellar, who served two terms as Secretary-General from 1982 to 1992.)