India's foreign policy underwent a paradigm shift in the last five years, said former foreign secretary S. Jaishankar at the launch of Harsh V. Pant's book, Indian Foreign Policy: The Modi Era, at the Observer Research Foundation on Wednesday.
Pant's book is a compilation of articles he wrote over the period of Modi's tenure as prime minister, and chronicles the trajectory of his foreign policy priotities.
The major changes in foreign policy from the Nehruvian times include pragmatic decision making, unpredictibility and integrating defence into diplomacy. It is also about increasing business and building trade ties, and leveraging soft power.
Jaishankar said the biggest achievement in the last five years was an intangible one, it was the status of the country on a global platform, which has risen phenomenally. “Very few will dispute that India's standing has gone up in the last few years. The world now expects more from us.” He gave the example of the recent natural calamity relief work in Mozambique. “People there expected India to be the first respondent to their crisis. This is different from the 2004 tsunami, when they had expected the US and Japan to come to their aid.”
Jaishankar said that as a nation with unsettled borders, it was a visible requirement to securitise foreign policy, and work to deny safe havens to terror groups. “Making security more central to diplomacy has yielded results,” he said. Jaishankar, who was foreign secretary for the larger part of Modis's tenure, said that another thrust was to integrate India's economic growth into diplomacy, which was revealing in the many joint statements during the visits of foreign dignitaries, where there was mention of India's technical and economic advances.
Jaishankar said that the times ahead were going to be turbulent, and that India would have to follow a multi-faceted foreign policy. He noted that every nation had a personality, India's was visible as a soft power. He mentioned how beautifully India had managed this by leveraging yoga and the diaspora.
Looking back at the successes and difficult moments, Jaishankar said that India did well with managing a stress situation at the Doklam trijunction. He noted that there will be a need to continue building strong, issue-based partnerships and increasing the footprint, regionally and globally. He said that even as India develops newer partnerships with countries, there will be differences. For instance, India will differ with Russia on Afghanistan, with the US over Iran and with China over a whole range of issues. “Differing does not mean it is a policy gone wrong,” he emphasised.
Answering questions on the politicisation of diplomacy, Jaishankar said that in this elections season, this is bound to happen. “We do not need to respond to every remark,'' he said, but added that “we have been more politicised in the past than now”. Regarding accusations that the government did not take political consensus in its actions, Jaishankar said that some operations were so secret that even everyone in the goverment was not aware of them. “It is unrealistic to expect that all parties will be taken into confidence (before such action),” he said, adding that immediately after the Uri strikes, everyone was informed.
“The new normal with Pakistan is still in the making,” he said, noting that Pakistan was a unique situation. “Nowhere else in the world you have a country obsessing over its neighbour while the neighbour goes about doing business as usual,'' he said, adding that even here, “it was important for us not to behave predictably. It is a positive move that we are trying to out-think Pakistan.”
The new ties with the UAE and Saudi Arabia, regions which had been written off for years as the constituency of Pakistan were major pluses, and were largely because of India's robust economy, he said.
Pant noted that foreign policy was slowly becoming personality driven. India's outreach had increased, it was also engaging more with others.
