Oh, dear. We weren’t expecting that. Not from the world’s largest democracy. And not at the United Nations.
It seems that India did not take too seriously Pakistan’s warning that it would bring up the Kashmir issue at the General Assembly moot. For the parts of the speech that mentioned this country were seemingly cobbled together mere hours before the External Affairs Minister took to the podium. At least that was the effect.
Naturally, we were expecting some rhetorical backlash. For was our speech not full of the same intent, just delivered a little pre-emptively? Meaning that Prime Minister Abbasi was taking aim at what this country sees as the bully boy nexus that casts the US, India and Afghanistan on the side of confrontation against Pakistan. We just had the good fortune to give our version first.
Yet what ensued from the Indian side was most unfortunate. Sushma Swaraj began by saying that while New Delhi is tackling poverty at home — Pakistan is engaged in fighting its eastern neighbour. She went on to say that it was laughable that PM Abbasi had the audacity to lecture India on human rights violations and state-sponsored terrorism. The intended punch line being that everyone who had heard this ‘ludicrousness’ had only one observation to make: look who’s talking? Actually, we do get the point that she is making. Yet in and of itself — as an answer this simply doesn’t cut it. For far better to debunk the legitimacy of claims that one side feels is anything but. Far worse is this casual, derisory dismissal. Besides, for once Pakistan wasn’t point scoring for the sake of it. Had this been the case PM Abbasi wouldn’t have called for the UN to appoint a Special Envoy to Kashmir. That is, a neutral observer committed to a tripartite dialogue process.
On the one hand, India dismissed Pakistani calls to revisit past UNSC resolutions, claiming that these have been overtaken by events. Yet on the other, it called for the world body to sign off on the Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism (CCIT) some twenty years after New Delhi proposed it. Yet we should support Indian moves on this front. Just as we should also share their frustration that more than two decades on and we are still waiting for the UN to reach consensus on defining terrorism. We should do this because it is the right thing to do. And also because India and Pakistan are essentially saying the same thing, whether on combating international terrorism or when it comes to trying to resolve the Kashmir dispute. Namely, that the UN should and must take responsibility. Or else face charges that it has violated its own Charter, something that it stood firmly accused of under the stewardship of one Mr Kofi Annan, when the organisation stood by helplessly as Bush and Blair waged a war of aggression. The supreme crime.
Let us hope that this was more a case of India playing to the home crowd. Let us similarly hope that the UN has taken note of its long neglected commitment to multilateralism and peaceful conflict resolution. And in the meanwhile let this sink in: India’s role as regional elder statesman is no longer guaranteed. Indeed the world’s largest democracy has been trumped on this front by Iran. After all, the latter acted with eloquent dignity when it took to the UN podium to tell Donald Trump where to shove his warmongering, without actually saying as much. *
Published in Daily Times, September 24th 2017.