India's Kashmir 'aggression' issue became accession issue: Jaishankar

NEW DELHI, DHNS: External Affairs Minister on Thursday took a jibe at the United Nations Security Council for turning New Delhi’s 1948 plea for help to stop Pakistan’s aggression in Kashmir into an opportunity to rather question the accession of the princely state by the then ruler Maharaj Hari Singh to India.

“That was always the case. Look at our own example. Very literally in our first year of Independence, we put our trust in multilateralism and took the Kashmir aggression issue to the UN and others made it into an accession issue and they did it for geopolitical reasons,” S Jaishankar said during a panel discussion at the Raisina Dialogue 2024 in New Delhi. He was replying to a question about coexistence between national interests and multilateralism and if interests, and not values, were increasingly dictating global relationships.

He was apparently referring to India’s January 1, 1948, plea to the UN Security Council to stop Pakistan’s aggression into J&K. The UNSC in April 1948 adopted a resolution that asked New Delhi to facilitate a plebiscite to decide the question of accession of Kashmir.

“If you say people are playing multilateralism, they always did. We have grown up. It is not that we should be against multilateralism,” he said, adding: “Multilateralism is a kind of lowest common denominator and anything above that. It will exist side-by-side with national interests with the calculations and competitions of countries.”

“If you take UNSC reform the biggest opposer (sic) is not a western country. We have to battle bit by bit to create the groups which will push for change,” he said in response to another question, tacitly taking a dig at China.

“We speak about globalisation for example. The fact is that the world trading rules have been gamed. And we have a lot of our challenges today that also emanate from how countries have used that for their benefit at the expense of the international system," he noted.