Listen to this article:

New Delhi: As India campaigns for a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council for 2028-29, Union external affairs minister S. Jaishankar used his UN General Assembly address on Saturday to foreground Global South concerns over economic coercion, maritime security and artificial intelligence, while making a rare explicit reference to a two-state solution for the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Pakistan, Palestine and Global South

At the General Assembly’s cavernous hall in New York, Jaishankar delivered his fifth consecutive speech at the annual plenary on Saturday afternoon, a run that began after Prime Minister Narendra Modi last attended the UNGA in person in 2021.

Two months after India formally launched its campaign for the Security Council seat, Jaishankar’s address touched on many  issues central to India’s campaign – including its development partnership with the Global South, peacekeeping, maritime security and its advocacy of a more representative international order – without making any direct reference to the election.

India faces a contested election this time, with Tajikistan also in the fray for the lone Asia-Pacific seat in a vote scheduled for June 2027. India was elected unopposed the last time it contested the seat, for the 2021-22 term.

As has become customary in his UNGA speeches, Jaishankar also devoted a section to terrorism, without naming Pakistan. 

Referring to the Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s address to the UNGA on Friday, he said that “a serial practitioner of terrorism misrepresented facts before this Assembly” and that attempts to “normalise terrorism and claim immunity from its consequences” would not stand. He reiterated that India would exercise its right to defend itself against terrorism and said that “friendship and goodwill cannot co-exist with terrorism”.

In his speech, Sharif had raised Kashmir, the Indus Waters Treaty and the 2025 military confrontation with India, crediting US President Donald Trump with averting a wider conflict. India subsequently exercised its right of reply, with its first secretary at the UN, Petal Gehlot, rejecting Sharif’s claims and accusing Pakistan of supporting terrorism.

But perhaps one of the more notable departure in Jaishankar’s speech, compared to........

© The Wire