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Diplomats honored at 2025 Diwali Stamp “Power of One” awards in NY
UN Trusteeship Council ceremony celebrates peace champions amid multilateral challenges.
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Rashi Mishra - Tue, 02, Dec 2025
- 23:10 EST
- 11
Batra and his wife Ranju Batra, who founded Diwali Foundation USA Inc. in 2017 following UNGA Resolution 69/250 recognizing Diwali. / Courtesy Photo
Four distinguished diplomats received the Diwali Stamp “Power of One” Awards on Tuesday in New York, at the United Nations for exemplary leadership in forging a “more perfect, peaceful, and secure world for all,” as hosted by Georgia’s Permanent Representative H.E. David Bakradze for the second consecutive year.
Ravi Batra, Chair of the National Advisory Council for South Asian Affairs, announced the awardees at the event with a call for accountability, “We need to honestly embrace our past in our accesses, so that our present can be better and fairness based. Because to exercise every right that we have just because we have it, does not make it correct in history.”
Batra and his wife Ranju Batra, who founded Diwali Foundation USA Inc. in 2017 following UNGA Resolution 69/250 recognizing Diwali, spearheaded the USPS Diwali Forever Stamp campaign after a seven-year effort that secured its release on October 5, 2016, the first such postal tribute to the festival symbolizing light over darkness.
The awards, co-organized by the Permanent Missions of Andorra, Armenia, Belarus, Chile, El Salvador, Eritrea, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Morocco, Sri Lanka, Zambia to the UN, the UN Alliance of Civilizations, and the National Advisory Council South Asian Affairs, honored diplomats embodying daily patriotism and resolve.
Jonathan Raphael Cohen, former US Ambassador to Egypt (2019-2022), was recognized for serving “with distinction as a P1 member of the Security Council between Nikki Haley and Kelly Craft.” Batra noted, “The recent peace achieved by Trump cannot have been achieved without Egypt as our dear friend.”
Dennis Francis, Trinidad and Tobago diplomat and 78th President of the UN General Assembly (September 2023-September 2024), received the award for “principal leadership to form a more perfect, peaceful and secure world for all.”
Darja Bavdaž Kuret, Slovenia's Permanent Representative to the UN (2017-2021) and now Special Envoy/Ambassador-at-Large for Women before her Moscow posting, was honored for the same principled leadership.
Magzhan Ilyassov, Kazakhstan’s diplomat, was cited amid the 2022 unrest, “a coup where no diplomat knew what to do when the government itself disintegrated”, for demonstrating “daily patriotism and loyalty to his country” through principal leadership.
India’s Permanent Representative Parvathaneni Harish addressed the gathering, “Today we are here after a year… we will find ways to work together, to face the challenges, and to overcome those challenges, to collaborate for the benefit of our citizens, to collaborate for every person around the world who needs help, we will work for solutions to remove conflict, we will work for solutions to save our environment, and we will work together in cooperative solutions so that peace and security should prevail. We will work so that sustainable development goals are not merely on paper, even though 2030 looks a distant goal, we will do all we can as we must to achieve these goals.”
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