WEB DESK
External Affairs Minister Dr S Jaishankar has said many people are turning to India today to seek solutions. He said India is not a bystander and has contributions to make in all of the big issues of the day like maritime, terrorism, security, and climate change.
Speaking at an event on Geopolitics of Opportunity, Dr Jaishankar said, non alignment was a term of a particular era and a particular geopolitical landscape.
He said, if India is to grow by leveraging the international situation, the country has to exploit the opportunities out there.
He said the era of great caution and dependence in a sense of multilateralism is to a certain extent gone.
Dr Jaishankar said that Japan and Australia have much higher international profile now.
He pointed out that India was never part of an alliance system and will never be a part of the alliance system.
He also said that the countries who earlier on depended on American decision making are today finding that they have to take a call on several issues.
He said many things are decided more regionally today and cited examples of North Africa and the Gulf.
He said we are moving towards a multi polar world with strong bipolar characteristics.
He said the rise of China has impacted the world very profoundly, but most of all it would impact its immediate neighbourhood.
Dr Jaishankar said China’s economy is about four and a half times the size of India.
He added that while India also grew fairly significantly in the past decades, there is a need to reflect on the fact that there were lots of areas where India could have done better.
He pointed out that India did not intensively industrialise, bring reforms and push manufacturing the way many other Asian economies did.
Dr Jaishankar said India is in a transition and its reach goes from the Carribbean to the South Pacific. He said, out of 54 countries in Africa, India has projects in 51 countries.
He said there is a lot of work to be done and comparison with China is a motivation to do better at home and leverage it outside.
The Minister also said that India has a complex neighbourhood.
He stressed on the need to create structural linkages so that they take care of the political cycles and any volatility that neighbouring countries’ politics may bring in.