India has taken up the issue of Beijing blocking its bid to get Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) chief Masood Azhar listed among the United Nations-designated terrorist at “very high level” in China.
“We have taken it up at a sort of very high level and we will continue to pursue this with the Chinese. This is an issue to be pursued with the Chinese in a UN context. I would not like to give the impression that somehow this is going to overflow into other areas. We have to wait and see where this goes,” Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar said on Wednesday.
Jaishankar, however, maintained that despite the Chinese blocking India’s bid to reign in the Pathankot terror attack mastermind, the issue was not going to affect India’s relationship with China in other areas.
On relation with Pakistan, he said that it will be hard for India to treat relations with Pakistan as normal unless the western neighbour addresses the issue of cross-border terrorism effectively. While maintaining that “Neighbourhood First” remains a strong priority for India’s foreign policy initiatives, Jaishankar said India expected Pakistan to addresses the core issue.
“Until we are able to address the issue (terrorism) effectively, obviously it is hard for us to say that the relationship is normal. Because this is what puts Pakistan in a different category than our other neighbours,” Jaishankar said during an interaction with media at the launch of global think-tank, Carnegie India. New Delhi is the sixth international centre of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace after Washington, Moscow, Beijing, Beirut and Brussels.
He added that given the challenge of the relationship with Pakistan, India has fared well in keeping the focus firmly on the central issue of terrorism. “Pakistan, of course, is a category by itself… If you see the interactions, I think, one change has been the centrality of addressing the issue of terrorism to dialogue... That was reflected when the two Prime Ministers met in Ufa. It was underlined when the two NSAs met in Bangkok… If you see the reconstituted dialogue that we have, the Comprehensive Bilateral Dialogue, the salience of terrorism (is there). This is not a point of argumentation. It is taking into account what is happening on the ground,” he said.
At the same time, Jaishankar added India also looks beyond to a more normal relationship featuring economic cooperation and people-to-people ties with Pakistan.
While talking about India’s ties with her neighbours, he said, “Admittedly, in Nepal and Maldives, there have been challenges that arose from their domestic politics. But even here, patience and perseverance are making their impact,” he said. On Afghanistan, the Foreign Secretary said the country was going through a difficult period and India’s reputation for reliability has only been strengthened by the broadening ambit of bilateral cooperation.
“When SAARC has worked, we are happy to forge ahead. Where there are difficulties, we are equally open to working plurilaterally or even sub-regionally. The intent is to get the region to be serious about cooperation within. The degree of attention being devoted to our neighbours today is probably unprecedented,” he said, adding that level of cordiality in engagement with Bangladesh, Bhutan and Sri lanka has gone up significantly.
However, he added that forging an international consensus on a difficult issue like terrorism is a test that still awaits India even if there has been progress in this respect.