“We are not debating a documentary or a speech someone gave in a European city. We are debating politics which is being conducted ostensibly. There is a phrase, ‘war by other means’. This is politics by other means,” he told news agency ANI. “You do a hatchet job and say this is just a quest for truth which we decided to put out 20 years later. Do you think timing is accidental? Don’t know if election season has started in India, but for sure it has started in London and New York,” he added.
He agreed that certain sections in the West are having problems accepting the rise of India under Modi. “Do you doubt it? It’s like drip, drip, drip on a stone… How do you shape a very extremist image of India, the government, of BJP, of the PM? It has been going on for a decade. Let’s not have illusions about it,” he said. “Today, India’s global standing is clearly very much higher and quite strong. We’ve been able to demonstrate to the world that we are an exceptional international power,” said Jaishankar.
EAM S Jaishankar hails PM Modi’s ‘global perspective’ for promoting millets
In a rebuttal to Congress over allegations pertaining to China, he said, “I think they are deliberately misrepresenting the situation. The Chinese first came there in 1958 and the Chinese captured it in October 1962. Now you are going to blame the Modi government in 2023 for a bridge which the Chinese captured in 1962 and you don’t have the honesty to say that it is where it happened.”
The minister said nobody should buy the narrative that India was being defensive or accommodating on China. “If we were being accommodating, who sent the Army to the LAC? Rahul Gandhi did not send them. Narendra Modi sent them. We have today the largest peacetime deployment in our history on the China border… We have increased our infrastructure spending on the border five times. Now tell me who is the defensive person? Who is actually telling the truth?” added Jaishankar.
Noting that he belongs to a family of bureaucrats and that the political opportunity as a Union minister came all of a sudden in 2019, Jaishankar said his father Dr K Subrahmanyam was removed as secretary, defence production, by former PM Indira Gandhi. “In 1980, when Indira Gandhi was re-elected, he was the first secretary that she removed. And he was the most knowledgeable person everybody would say on defence,” Jaishankar said, adding that his father was superseded during the Rajiv Gandhi period with someone junior to him becoming the cabinet secretary.
