Bland but well-meaning
The most important thing about PM's speech was what he didn't say: the Paki-bashing. The rest was bound to be bland but well-meaning, writes Vir Sanghvi.
Prime Ministerial addresses to the United Nations General Assembly can usually be summed up by a single phrase: dull, dull, dull. In the early 1990s, Narasimha Rao put the General Assembly to sleep with his ponderous but croaky delivery and even as skilled an orator as A. B. Vajpayee always seemed ill-at-ease in the General Assembly.
The exception was last year. India-Pakistan relations were at a nadir and General Musharraf entered the chamber, all guns blazing before delivering a Kashmir-focussed anti-India tirade. Forced to respond in kind, Vajpayee was unusually aggressive, spoke without his usual lengthy pauses and in a crisp, fighting speech destroyed the Pakistani case.
This year it's all back to normal. India-Pak relations are on the mend and part of the back-channel deal between the two countries was that they would deliver General Assembly speeches that were non-Kashmir focussed.
The good news is that it marks an end to the hostility of the last year. The bad news is that it is back to dull, dull, dull.
The most important thing about Manmohan Singh's speech was what he didn't say: the Paki-bashing. With that component out of the mix, the rest was bound to be bland but well-meaning.
You could, if you wanted to be kind, hail the speech as outlining India's vision of the world. For example: "If we look around us, the single most defining characteristic of our contemporary world is the global, transnational character of the challenges we confront…. "Global" and "Transnational"? As the old bureaucratic adage goes, why use one word when you can use two?
But if you were going to be unkind, you would describe it as a routine speech, which made the routine points and despite the odd striking phrase or sentence ("I speak of an India on the move, on the cutting edge of economic, technological and developmental transformations") made in the most routine manner.
Still, Manmohan Singh's sincerity shone through and we announced to the world that we were not Pak-obsessed.
That's worth two cheers, I suppose.