‘Changes in foreign policy needed amid changing landscape,’ says Jaishankar

PTI, Dec 16, 2024, 8:26 AM IST

New Delhi: External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Sunday said there must be “a foreign policy for Viksit Bharat” given a changing landscape.

In his address at the launch of India’s World magazine here, he also said, “When we speak about changing foreign policy, if there is talk of a post-Nehruvian construct, it should not be treated as a political attack.” Jaishankar said that on the world stage, India is increasingly becoming “a player of consequence.” He said the number of Indians working abroad is going to “grow dramatically” in the coming years. “We are going to see an explosion in mobility,” he added.

“My sense for a foreign policy ahead would be to think big, think long, but to think smart,” he said.

At the event, the Union minister later also engaged in a brief conversation with foreign policy expert C Raja Mohan, who chairs the editorial board of the magazine.

In his address, the EAM said India is planning “at least a generation ahead” and trying to “expand its footprint, however, lightly.” “So, if we visualise the world in a much more focussed way, in a much more actionable way, if we learn to play the world stage more adeptly, which is not without its risks and anxieties, and actually look over the horizon, I think you have the makings here of what would be in a sense, a multi-generational foreign policy,” he said.

The EAM said India has moved to a foreign policy that is much more directly tasked with advancing national development. “(The) defensive crouch, into which we had, for a variety of reasons, got into, that era is decisively behind us.” Jaishankar said there are “four big factors” that should cause people in India to ask themselves what changes are necessary in foreign policy.

“One, and I happened, by coincidence, to speak about it yesterday, for many, many years, we had what someone else very pithily summed up as the ‘Nehru development model’. That was a book released yesterday by Dr Arvind Panagariya,” he said.

A ‘Nehru development model’, inevitably produced a ‘Nehru foreign policy’ and “we seek to correct that abroad,” just as efforts are being made to “reform” the consequences of the model at home, Jaishankar said on Saturday, in his virtual address at the launch of the book ‘The Nehru Development Model’.

In his address at Sunday’s event, he reiterated the view.

“I mean, it was obvious. And, it wasn’t just what was happening in our country, there was an international landscape in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s which was bipolar. Then there was a unipolar landscape. And, both those landscapes have also changed,” the EAM said.

On top of it, in the last two decades or so, there has been a “very intense globalisation,” a strong interdependence with countries, he said.

“In a way, the relationship, the behaviour of states towards each other have changed,” he said.

Finally, “technology in our daily existence, that too has changed,” he added.

“So, if the domestic model has changed, if the landscape has changed, if the behavioural patterns of states have changed, and if the tools of foreign policies have changed, how can foreign policy remain the same,” he argued.

He said his batting for a change in foreign policy must not be treated as a political attack.

“I mean, it didn’t require Narendra Modi to do it, Narasimha Rao started it,” he said.

On India’s aspiration to become a developed nation, he said, India must think about, “How to be more ambitious, how to plan ahead.” Most of it is about positioning, the minister said, in terms of having “minimal baggage.” “And in that positioning the concept of ‘Vishwa Bandhu’ came about,” he added.

“Because the global landscape for a variety of reasons, has become very volatile, become very turbulent, very uncertain,” the EAM said.

The task is “cut out for us, because ‘Viksit Bharat’ means India’s rise.” The vision, wrought by the presiding Narendra Modi government, seeks to make India a developed nation by 2047.

“We cannot not rise, we have to continue to rise, we have to just plan it for a very difficult circumstance in which the world is going to be…How do you do that, some mixture of offence, defence, of hedging, prudence, of joining in rebalancing, of participating in re-globalisation, of accelerating multi-polarity, utilising the impact of technology,” Jaishankar said.

In his address, the EAM also touched upon the aspects of various tracks of diplomacy.

“Our public space discourse should not be theological, it should not be polemical, it should not come as a defence of the past versus a compulsion to move beyond the past,” he said.

“Just like the economic debates and the economic model of this country became more open, I think foreign policy, foreign policy thinking of this country has to keep pace with what is happening in this country and needs to be more open. And, for that it’s important to have an integrated outlook,” the EAM asserted.

The minister said the world order “no longer encourages fixed-point collaboration.” India today in the world is “a player which other turns to, even when we are bashful at times, and to get the best, we need to have a multi-vector foreign policy,” he said. On the idea of India as a first responder to crises, he said, “I can predict, it will get more and more frequent.”