Outrages on Indian mission
India has repeated its demand that Pakistan make full amends for the outrages committed on the Indian diplomatic mission in Pakistan recently and tender an apology. In a note handed to the Pakistan High Commission here [New Delhi] on October 21, the Government of India has also repudiated the High Commission’s complaints of various discomforts last month.
Twenty years after
The United Nations was 20 years old yesterday [October 24]. And they have been twenty of the most critical years in history. During this period man has acquired the power to blow civilisation itself up in a mushroom cloud and, for his not having put this awesome power to such deadly use the United Nations can truly claim the lion’s share of the credit. The world has often teetered on the verge of a holocaust. There have been many conflicts which have contained the seeds of a major war. There can be no doubt that it is the U.N.’s restraining influence and the opportunity it has provided for calmer thinking that has saved the world on every one of these tense occasions from actually going over the brink. It is indeed an inspiring record of achievement that the U.N. has established, for which it deserves the thanks of the human race. The U.N. has, of course, had its share of failings and shortcomings, some of which have made bigger headlines than its achievements. But these failings and shortcomings have been not of its making but of the Great Powers’. They are the result of the limitations imposed on it by those powers who were supposed to be the pillars on which its whole edifice was meant by its founders to rest but whose attitudes in practice have tended to undermine it. If some of the conflicts which the U.N. has helped to contain have resulted only in uneasy truce and not in firm peace, the blame belongs not to it but to these Great Powers who chose to transfer their feuds to the arena of the world organisation and have tried to convert it into an instrument of their national policies. For instance, if the Kashmir issue remains unsolved after 18 years, it is only because the Big Western Powers have, for their own purposes, refused to recognise the core of the problem which is Pakistan’s aggression, and to pull up the aggressor.
