WORLD

India called for “zero tolerance” to terrorism by the Taliban dispensation in Afghanistan saying that in the middle of challenges there were “few opportunities”. Addressing an emergency UN security council meeting on Monday evening, India’s ambassador, T S Tirumurti said, “the current situation prevailing in the country is of great concern to us in India.”

Saying that prior to the current unrest, India had ongoing development projects in all 34 provinces of Afghanistan, Tirumurti said, “It is time for the international community to come together unitedly, rising above any partisan interests, to support the people of Afghanistan in their desire for peace, stability and security in the country and to enable all Afghans, including women, children and minorities, to live in peace and dignity.”

Whether it is the Indian leadership or the average Indian, “we aspire to bigger things,” said foreign minister S Jaishankar, addressing the India@75: The Freedom Summit organised by Times Now on Sunday.

“The rise of power starts at home and a lot of the progress in the last seven years is very visible at home,” Jaishankar said, pointing to growth and reform in many sectors including “expanding manufacturing, undertaking agricultural reforms, looking at our human resources, improving education and skilling, making it easier to do business, creating a system where we look after our people, health, housing, power and water as basic needs which need to be provided so that the quality of living and the quality of our resources is much better.” That’s how countries like China grew and developed he said.

After a regional conference in Doha, India joined Qatar and several other countries in declaring that there will be no recognition of any military takeover of Afghanistan and in calling for an immediate and comprehensive ceasefire.

According to Qatar, China and Pakistan were among the countries who said they won't recognise any violent takeover in a separate meeting in Doha on August 10 this week.

The bad news continued to pour in from Afghanistan Friday about the Taliban military offensive with reports saying that the insurgents were close to taking control of India's showpiece infrastructure project Salma dam, also called India-Afghanistan Friendship Dam, in the Herat province. The dam had been inaugurated in 2016 by President Ashraf Ghani and PM Narendra Modi. The province capital and Afghanistan's third-largest city, Herat city, also fell to the Taliban, reports from Afghanistan said.

Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan told foreign journalists late Wednesday night that he believed the US had picked India to partner with in the subcontinent.

"I think the Americans have decided that India is a strategic partner. Maybe that’s why Pakistan is being treated differently. Pakistan is just considered to be useful only in the context of settling this mess (Afghanistan)," Khan was quoted by Dawn (online) as saying at an interaction with foreign media at his home here.

"The hasty way in which the Americans left, if they wanted a political settlement then common sense dictates that (you negotiate) from a position of strength," he was quoted as saying, adding that the US was now blaming Pakistan when they no longer had any leverage. He said that another reason for the US’s shifting position was his country’s close relationship with China.

At least two previous attempts to address the issue of maritime security in the UN Security Council went nowhere. Vietnam had tried to push it in April 2021 and Equatorial Guinea in February 2019, without success.

In the lexicon of current global politics, “maritime security” is code for Chinese actions in the South China Sea. Being extraordinarily sensitive to this, China has nixed previous attempts.

India was determined to make an impression in its month at the helm of the UNSC, and used its considerable diplomatic heft to put together the first standalone session on maritime security, which went beyond piracy and crime. The final presidential statement which was adopted set out a framework of existing international laws to govern activities at sea — from UNCLOS to the SUA Convention and a host of others in between. By reaffirming these laws, the message was that enforcing a rules-based order was something countries would push.