India follows an independent foreign policy and cannot be a “pale imitation” of others, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said here on Wednesday while urging the world to focus on “stopping the fighting and getting to talking” to deal with the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict.
He made this observation a day after slamming the western nations for ignoring the developments in Asia and also said India’s position on the crisis is best placed to advance such an approach.
Reiterating the country’s stand, Jaishankar said India cannot please other nations by being a “pale imitation” of what they are.
“We have to be confident about who we are. I think it’s better to engage with the world on the basis of who we are rather than try and please the world by being a pale imitation of what they are,” he said at the Raisina Dialogue.
“The idea that others define us, that you know somewhere we need to get approval from other quarters, I think, that’s an era we need to put behind,’’ he stressed.
“We spent a lot of time yesterday on Ukraine and I have tried to explain what our views are but also explained that in our minds the best way forward is to focus on stopping the fighting, getting them talking and finding ways of moving forward. We think our choices, our positions are best placed to advance that,” he said.
He also elaborated upon India’s 75-year-long journey after Independence and highlighted how the country played a key role in promoting democracy in South Asia.
Reflecting on areas where India came up short, Jaishankar opined lack of adequate attention to human resources and manufacturing and mentioned that probably not much attention was given to hard security as part of foreign policy.
Asked about what should be the priority for the country in the next 25 years, Jaishankar said capability development in all possible areas should be the central focus.
He hoped that India will be “deeply more international” in terms of its commitments, responsibilities and roles in the next 25 years. “We should not be looking at the world with a sense of entitlement. We need to earn our place in the world,” he said.
On India’s expectations from the international community, the Minister said “there is a lot of talk about reliable and resilient supply chains and people speak about transparency and trusted technologies.
If India could do more and show the rest of the world that the world benefits by India being bigger,” Jaishankar said.
“So we need to develop stakes in our future whether the rest of the world is concerned. I think some of that is happening for strategic reasons obviously, but we need to make more of it happen especially for economic reasons,” he added.
Underlining India’s 75-year-long successful democratic journey, Jaishankar said the choices made by India have had a larger influence globally.
Jaishankar said there is a “gut sense” that democracy is the future, and a large part of this is due to the choices made by India in the past. “There was a time when in this part of the world, we were the only democracy. If democracy is global today or we see it global today, in some measure, the credit is due to India,” he said.
India contributed to the spreading of democracy in South Asia, Jaishankar said adding “we would like to see more prosperity in South Asia. If India has been in a sense example of democracy or promoter of democracy in South Asia, we would now like to be part of a larger lifting tide so that the rest of South Asia grows along with us”.
However, it is also fair to look back on where the country came up short, he said, and listed some shortcomings. “One, clearly we did not pay the kind of attention to our social indicators, our human resources as we should have. Two, we did not concentrate on manufacturing and technology strengths as we should have. And three, in terms of foreign policy, probably, in the mix of various elements, we did not give as much importance, as much weight to hard security as we should have,” he said.
Asked about the shortage of wheat in the wake of the war in Ukraine and if India would like to contribute to addressing the issue, he said “We have a significant wheat production. We would obviously go into the global markets and try to compensate for the shortfalls as much as we can. It (Egypt) is one of the countries with whom we are talking.”