UN General Assembly
1962

10. Then the Indian Government has officially stated that, being in favour of the independence of peoples, it would like to start negotiations for the transfer of power from Portugal to India. The conclusions to be drawn from such a statement are that annexation of a territory by India immediately gives to that territory the status of independence — while the integration of the same territory into another sovereignty gives it the status of a "colony"; secondly, that Indian sovereignty has to be considered better than and superior to any other sovereignty: and finally that the negotiations desired by India were not be conducted between the people of the territory and the responsible country, as required by the resolutions of the General Assembly, but between the responsible country and India and this merely for the purpose of transferring the territory to India. In regard to this last point, one has to note therefore that, when the Indian Government seeks to annex an alleged colonial territory, it demands that such negotiations ought only to consist in the transfer of the territory from the sovereignty to which it belongs to the sovereignty of the Indian Union, Since Indian sovereignty, in our humble view, is neither superior nor inferior to Portuguese sovereignty, we fail to understand how and why, in the case of Portuguese India, the territory would become any more independent than it was by the fact of its abandoning Portuguese sovereignty in order to be incorporated into Indian sovereignty.