A video (here and here), purported to be a news report by journalist Sudhir Chaudhary, in which he claims India has secured a permanent membership in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and acquired veto power after 154 nations voted in favour of India, is circulating on social media. According to the video, this ‘historic event’ took place at the United Nations General Assembly. We will fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: India has secured a permanent membership in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and acquired veto power through the support of 154 nations.
Fact: India has not yet secured a permanent membership in the UNSC and has not gained veto power. The viral video is a Deepfake created using visuals of Journalist Sudhir Chaudhary. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To verify the claim, we conducted an internet search to determine whether India has recently secured a permanent membership in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and acquired the right to veto. However, we did not find any credible reports supporting this claim.
We further checked the official website and YouTube channel of the United Nations (UN) to learn more about any such alleged decision and found no evidence to validate the claim. The UN did not pass any resolution of permanent membership and veto power in the UNSC during the 2025 annual United Nations General Assembly debates (80th session) (here and here).
According to the information available on the UN website, India is not yet a permanent member of the UNSC and does not hold veto power. Currently, only five countries — China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States — are permanent members of the UNSC, and only these permanent members have the veto power.
Apart from the permanent members, the UN has ten non-permanent members elected for two-year terms by the United Nations General Assembly. Currently, Algeria, Denmark, Greece, Guyana, Pakistan, Panama, the Republic of Korea, Sierra Leone, Slovenia, and Somalia are the 10 non-permanent members of the UNSC.
During this search, we found reports (here, here, here, and here) indicating that the UNSC’s permanent member nations, including Russia, the US, France, and the UK, have extended their support for India to become a permanent member of the UNSC.
According to a report published by The New Indian Express in February 2025, India’s permanent representative to the UN, Parvathaneni Harish, spoke about the expansion of both permanent and non-permanent members, calling out nations opposing the expansion of the UNSC’s permanent seats (here, here, and here).
Apart from this, we did not find any video report of journalist Sudhir Chaudary reporting on India securing a permanent membership in the UN and acquiring veto power. We observed lip-sync discrepancies in the initial portion of the viral video where he speaks. This raised a suspicion that the voice in the video could be a deepfake audio, and we ran the audio through Hiya, a deepfake audio detection tool. It gave the audio an authenticity score of 1/100, and its result said that the audio could likely be a deepfake.
We found a longer version of this video on a YouTube channel named ‘Info Gyan’ that contained many such deepfake videos of Journalist Sudhir Chaudhary.
To sum up, India did not secure a permanent membership and acquire veto power in the UNSC.
