“India alone cannot walk the path of peace. Pakistan must walk away from terror if it wants to walk towards dialogue with India,” said prime minister Narendra Modi while delivering the inaugural speech at the second edition of Raisina Dialogue, a joint endeavour by the ministry of external affairs and the thinktank, Observer Research Foundation.
The three day event will see several former heads like Hamid Karzai (Afghanistan) and Stephen Harper (Canada) as well as several ministers and bureaucrats and foreign policy experts deliberate on a host of subjects related to international policies.
While his attack on Pakistan was direct, Modi made a subtler dig at China. Acknowledging that "it is not unnatural for two large neighbouring powers to have some differences" he pointed out that the security architecture needs to be inclusive and rooted in international norms of sovereignty. It was an obvious reference to China's expansion in the South China Sea and refusal to accept the verdict of the international court of arbitration.
In another reference to India's entry to the Nuclear Security Group being blocked, he noted that institutional and architectural barriers from a different worlds seem outdated, posting a barrier to multilateralism. The world needs India's growth just as much as India needs the world, he noted.
