Prime Minister Narendra Modi asserted that India gave the world “Buddha not Yuddha” along with a message of "peace and harmony" at the United Nations General Assembly, saying terrorism is the biggest challenge before humanity and the world needs to be united against it. “For the sake of humanity… it is absolutely imperative that the world unites against terrorism, and stands as one against it.”
In a short address before the UN General Assembly, PM Modi started by highlighting Mahatma Gandhi's 150th birth anniversary, which will be celebrated this year, and was followed by the prime minister thanking the assembly for its stand on single-use plastic. Modi did not for once referred to Pakistan while making a broad appeal to fight the “evil” of terrorism. “We believe that this is one of the biggest challenges, not for any single country, but for the entire world and humanity,” Modi told world leaders and UN delegates.
Instead of engaging in a squabble with his Pakistan counterpart, the Indian prime minister chose to deal largely with broader issues like climate change, renewable energy, poverty alleviation and India’s progress and lessons learned in this regard, which it wanted to channel to other countries. The omission of any mention of Pakistan and Kashmir was a straight message to the world that the nullification of Article 370 is an internal matter and is not a subject to discussion on a global platform, and furthermore, it's a done deal.
This is the first time that Pakistan has not been mentioned in an Indian address - by the prime minister or the external affairs minister - in the General Assembly address in eight years. The only time India omitted Pakistan from its speech in the last decade was in 2011.
Imran warned of nuclear conflagration
However, in a nearly 45-minute address to the UN an hour after the address by PM Modi, the Pakistan PM Imran Khan launched a ferocious attack on the RSS, including personal attacks on PM Modi. Khan warned of a nuclear conflagration in the subcontinent that would affect the whole world if the global community did not intervene in the Kashmir issue.
“It is not a threat, it is a fear… it is a worry,” Khan told the UN, raising the specter of a nuclear conflagration and arguing that anything could happen when a nuclear country “fights to its death”. Khan’s lengthy diatribe included accusing India of terrorism in Balochistan and claims that India was trying to put Pakistan on the FATF blacklist in an “effort to bankrupt us”, even though the FATF process is multilateral and Pakistan’s financial support for terrorists is a matter of record even in the United Nations.
