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UNGA81 And The Multipolar Drift | Part 15 Of 15 Image Source: @UN on X Every September, world leaders come to the green marble podium of the General Assembly, deliver their national statements and leave. Most of what they say is forgotten within days. Read together rather than one at a time, the statements of this year's General Debate, held from September 22 to 28, record something larger than any one of them conveyed, that a broad, cross-regional admission that the distribution of power has moved faster than the institutions meant to manage it. The Secretary-General set the terms on the opening morning. "We are clearly moving towards a multipolar world. And that movement is irreversible," António Guterres said in his final address to a General Debate before his term ends. He did not present this as good news or bad news. He said multipolarity could take two shapes: a world of "fragmentation and transactionalism", or a "networked" one in which severa...

UNGA81 And The Multipolar Drift | Part 14 Of 15 File Photo: @DrSJaishankar on X Malaysia told the UN General Assembly it was "sick of" the Security Council veto and called for its abolition, arguing that the world's "global majority" could no longer simply live with decisions taken by a few. Delivering Malaysia's national statement on Saturday, September 26, Foreign Minister Mohamad Hasan said nowhere was the need for reform more critical. "No place requires reform more than the Security Council. No place more clearly exposes the weaknesses of the United Nations than the Security Council," he said. His frustration centred on Gaza. Malaysia and other states, he said, had pursued every avenue, including calls for an immediate ceasefire, unrestricted humanitarian aid, punitive action against Israel and full UN membership for Palestine. "Yet, again and again, the collective will of this assembly has encountered the silencing effect of the veto. ...

UNGA81 And The Multipolar Drift | Part 13 Of 15 File Photo: @DrSJaishankar on X Belarus used the UN General Assembly to accuse the European Union of clinging to a "slipping dominance", a day after co-launching with Russia a Eurasian charter meant to anchor a multipolar order on the continent. Foreign Minister Maxim Ryzhenkov addressed the General Debate on Saturday, September 26. Turning the session's theme on the organisation itself, he said the UN "does not work for the benefit of all" and "does not manage change", blaming states he accused of deliberately undermining the system of international relations. He singled out the EU. Belarus, he said, was "concerned by the policies of the European Union's leadership", whose aim he described as preserving its "slipping dominance". He questioned whether Europeans wanted to become "cannon fodder" in a future war with Russia, and accused officials in Brussels of wanting to ...

UNGA81 And The Multipolar Drift | Part 12 Of 15 Cuba told the UN General Assembly that the international system was dangerously close to falling into "the law of the jungle", as Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla accused the United States of imposing an "energy blockade" that has repeatedly brought down the island's power grid. Image Source: @BricsIndia2026 Addressing the General Debate on Saturday, September 26, Rodríguez said international law and the founding principles of the UN, among them the sovereign equality of States, were under "permanent attack" from expanding militarism and economic coercion. He called Washington's aim of imposing peace through force absurd and unachievable. He opened by recalling that 66 years earlier, almost to the hour, Fidel Castro had addressed the Assembly from the same podium. The centre of the speech was an account of US pressure since January. "Since January, 2026, this aggression has strengthene...

India said on Saturday that it had secured the deportation from Türkiye of Navpreet Singh, who the government says had obtained Turkish citizenship under a false identity and continued to move heroin and methamphetamine into India from Afghanistan. The Union home minister, Amit Shah, announced it, describing Singh as a hardened narco-trafficking kingpin who had lived as Navab Virk until Indian agencies, in his words, ripped apart veil after veil to establish who he was. Singh has been brought back and jailed in connection with drug trafficking and other cases in which he is an accused.  "Modi govt is committed to destroying every narco-cartel before Dec 2029," Shah wrote. The framing is worth noticing as much as the arrest. A man accused of smuggling is described in the vocabulary of a security threat and his return is presented not as a police success but as a national one. Over the past several years India has steadily moved narcotics out of the category of crime and publ...

India summoned the senior-most Pakistani diplomat in New Delhi on Saturday to protest against what it called the continued facilitation of illegal cross-border infiltration, and dismissed Pakistani allegations about an incident on the Punjab border two days earlier. File Photo: BSF India The Ministry of External Affairs said it had called in the Chargé d'Affaires of the Pakistan High Commission and lodged a strong protest. It described Pakistan's claims over the 2 October incident in the Ferozepur sector as "baseless and motivated". According to the ministry's account, three people crossed into Indian territory and kept moving towards the border fence after repeated warnings from the Border Security Force to turn back. "The BSF was compelled to engage them for posing an imminent security threat," the ministry said in its statement. It placed the episode within what it called a wider pattern. "This incident highlights a clear pattern of repeated c...

Six of Indian Parliament's 24 department-related standing committees have changed hands in the annual reconstitution of the panels, which takes effect from 26 September 2026 for the 2026-27 term, with the Trinamool Congress losing the two chairmanships it held. Image Source: @TajinderBagga on X A parliamentary bulletin setting out the new composition was issued on Saturday. The commerce committee, which the Trinamool's Rajya Sabha member Dola Sen chaired through the outgoing year, passes to Sudhanshu Trivedi of the BJP. The committee on chemicals and fertilisers, chaired by the Trinamool's Kirti Azad, goes to Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar. Dastidar's position is itself unsettled. She led a group of Trinamool MPs that broke away after the West Bengal assembly elections earlier this year and told the Lok Sabha Speaker it had merged with the Nationalist Citizens Party of India, a Tripura-based outfit, seeking recognition as a separate bloc. Om Birla has yet to rule on the claim...

The Crown Prince of Dubai visited Captain Smit Machchhar on Saturday, days after the Indian pilot was stabbed in the cockpit of a flydubai aircraft carrying 174 people and managed, while bleeding and pinned to the floor, to release the cockpit door so that passengers and crew could overpower his attacker. Image Source: DubaiMediaOffice "He embodied the highest degrees of courage, responsibility, and care for human life," Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum said in a statement issued by the Dubai Media Office. "We are proud that he is part of our team, part of the story of our nation, and part of what the UAE stands for: a nation of compassion, a nation of peace, and a nation of life." Hamdan bin Mohammed: During a visit to Captain Smit Machchhar… the flydubai pilot who embodied the highest degrees of courage, responsibility, and care for human life. From us, and from the leadership of the nation, he has our full appreciation and praise. We are proud th...

Captain Smit Machchhar was in a hospital bed, on the phone with the Indian Prime Minister, and somewhere in the middle of it he broke down. "Sorry, main aapke saamne ro raha hoon sir." Narendra Modi told him that if he could not cry in front of him, then where.  The flydubai aircraft Machchhar was commanding from Dubai to Tel Aviv fell close to 14,000 feet in under thirty seconds. His first officer, an Omani national, had stabbed him in the cockpit, and an unlawful interference code went out that scrambled Israeli fighter jets. There were 174 people on board. The aircraft landed at Tabuk in north-western Saudi Arabia. The first officer was arrested. Benjamin Netanyahu said Machchhar had prevented a catastrophic midair disaster. Modi said his valour had saved hundreds of lives. In the conversation, Machchhar describes it without any of that vocabulary. He had fallen. He was wounded, he was pinned beneath something, he was still being struck. And he says he could feel, the way...