India should be permanent UNSC member: Henry Kissinger had said in 1972

India and Japan ought to be the permanent members of the UN Security Council, Henry Kissinger had said in 1972 when he was the National Security Advisor to then US president Richard Nixon, according to a decades-old diplomatic conversation released on Wednesday. 

Kissinger's response had come to a question from Robert Ingersoll, who was then the US Ambassador to Japan. 

During the meeting between the two in Washington DC on April 3, 1972, Ingersoll asked how Kissinger, now 95 years old, felt about a possible effort on America's part to make Japan a permanent member of the UN Security Council.

"Mr Kissinger declared that this was inevitable in his opinion. Both Japan and India ought to be permanent members. However, as of the present moment he knew of no particular effort on our part in this direction," according to the memorandum of the conversation between the two.

John H Holdridge, a senior staff member, was the only other official present at the meeting. 

The Department of State on Wednesday released Foreign Relations of the United States 19691976 Volume XIX, Part 2, Japan, 19691972.

Part 1 of the volume on US bilateral relations with Korea, 19691972, was published in 2010.

Kissinger is scheduled to deliver the keynote address to the Leadership Summit of the US India Strategic and Partnership Forum in July.