Good, Bad and Ugly: Takeaways from Modi’s first UN speech in New York

It was Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s biggest and grandest speech at the world’s biggest diplomatic gathering, the 69th session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Saturday, and he came up with a reasonably good performance. In my view, Modi may not have scored a century on debut at the world’s diplomatic high table but he definitely scored a high fifty. [caption id=“attachment_1733429” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the UN General Assembly in New York. Reuters[/caption] Addressing the UNGA in Hindi, talking passionately about yoga, reading from a prepared text but frequently breaking into spontaneous, extempore, engage-with-me kind of remarks, Modi demonstrated to the world how he burst on to the Indian political scene with a historic mandate. At times, mostly during the extempore bits of his speech, Modi donned the mantle of a statesman and a philosopher. He talked about the need for moving from G One approach to G All. He decried the zero-sum game approach and stressed why it was not always necessary to view a development or a situation from the prism of winners and losers. This was Modi the Statesman. While talking of the journey of the UNGA in the last 69 years, he went extempore to say that it was time for all to reflect on “Where we had come from and why? Where we have reached till now? Where are we headed?” This was Modi the Philosopher. But now let us discuss the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly side of Modi’s maiden address to the UNGA. The Good Undoubtedly, the best part of Modi’s speech was the way he handled Pakistan and his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif who had addressed the UNGA a day before and punctuated his speech with the usual rant on the K word. Modi gave a comprehensive and mature response to Sharif’s rant on Kashmir without referring to the Kashmir-centric issues raised by Sharif. Modi extended the hand of friendship and cooperation to Pakistan and said he was keen on talking to Pakistan but not under the shadow of terror. The only context in which he named Kashmir was while talking about the Kashmir floods. In that context, he quickly inserted his government’s offer of help to Pakistan as the Pakistan-held Kashmir too reeled under floods like Jammu and Kashmir. Throughout the several minutes of his speech wherein he dwelt on Pakistan, he made it clear what his government’s Pakistan policy was all about: friendship, cooperation, peace talks and et al but nothing at the point of gun. He defended his government’s policy of canceling formal talks (at the foreign secretaries’ level) with Pakistan saying that a lot of people doubted whether such talks would have resulted into anything positive. But Modi’s biggest USP in giving it back to Pakistan and Nawaz Sharif was that he chose not to stoop to Sharif’s level and ignored his Kashmir rant completely. He simply said that such issues were not meant to be raised at a forum like UNGA. And yet he delineated all the green and red lines vis a vis Pakistan. The Bad Well, first of all, there was nothing bad in Modi’s speech at the UNGA. But then there is no one who cannot improve further. Therefore, the ensuing criticism should be taken constructively. He was repetitive on many points. He hopped on from one point to another, without doing justice to the valid points he raised. For example, he talked of how the seas were meant to connect all people in the globe but today the seas were dividing people. In this remark, he was actually referring to China and the South China Sea and East China Sea disputes. But Modi left his remarks vague. Perhaps he did not want to have a dig at China from the UN forum (something no Indian Prime Minister has ever done before). But it left the world’s diplomatic audience wondering what he was actually trying to say. In many ways, it was a call that Modi perhaps wanted to make but which eventually dropped because of poor signals! The Ugly The worst part of Modi’s speech was that he could not convey to the international community that India under his regime and as an aspiring superpower in the next few decades, India had a view on each and every international flashpoint. For example, Modi referred to Afghanistan and praised the land-locked South Asian country for its efforts to resume normal life, but did not give where India exactly stood on the Afghanistan conundrum. Similarly, he talked about new forces in international terrorism – an obvious reference to Islamic State (IS) – but stopped short of discussing the subject specifically, an issue that has been dominating the international psyche for weeks. Probably, Modi omitted a direct reference to the IS because of the fact that 39 Indian construction workers from Punjab still continue to be in the custody of the IS since 15 June. Whether this strategy was right or wrong is another story where experts can go on with for-and- against arguments. Overall, Modi’s debut on the high table of multilateral diplomacy was commendable. He may not have scored a century on debut but his score was definitely in the 70’s. The writer is FirstPost Consulting Editor and a strategic analyst who tweets @Kishkindha.