Tried to maintain balance, China’s 2020 move changed that: S Jaishankar

S Jaishankar said, today our effort is to build our deep strength.

New Delhi:

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Monday said that India and China are rising and in the process both the countries are changing the world order.

Citing talks between the leadership of the two countries in Mamallapuram and Wuhan, Mr Jaishankar said India tried to maintain “balance” in relations through diplomacy, but relations had deteriorated following China’s military build-up on the Line of Actual Control. Took a different turn. Control over violation of prescribed norms in 2020.

External Affairs Minister speaking at the Media Summit organized by TV9 Networkdescribed the rise of India and China as “significant” in the global geopolitical landscape.

Responding to a question, he said, “If you list three or four big things that have changed in the last 20-25 years, I think most people would agree that it would be the rise of China and the rise of India. ” ,

“You can say that China started it much earlier because our own politics delayed the reform era here. That’s fine. What’s done is done. But there is no question about it, both countries are moving forward.” And for world politics, it’s a very interesting problem.” ” He said.

“The problem is: both are changing the world order by their rise. So each has an impact on the world. But they are also neighbors. So their relationship is changing, too, while it is changing—the rest of the world observes.” Do,” Mr Jaishankar said.

The Foreign Minister argued that, therefore, the situation was making it “very complicated to strike a balance”. When Mr Jaishankar was specifically asked about the informal summits between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping in the Chinese city of Wuhan in 2018 and Mamallapuram in 2019, he said they were part of “balance maintenance exercises”. .

“We tried to maintain that balance naturally – first through diplomacy. So what you saw in Wuhan and Mamallapuram etc. was an exercise in maintaining that balance,” he said.

“But what happened in 2020, China for whatever reason decided to move military forces in disregard of the agreements. This demanded a different response to the balance,” he said.

“The logical thing for us to do, which we did, was that we moved our forces on a very large scale. So from 2020 onwards, you have a balance, part of which is military posture in the border areas, one today “Part of it is obviously political relations affected by this border situation,” he said.

“Part of it is the economic measures we have taken,” he said.

Mr Jaishankar said the Modi government believes that the interests of the country’s working class, small enterprises and small industries should be protected from “unfair competition”.

“Today our effort is to build our deep strengths. We have to build our digital capabilities, our telecom, our manufacturing, our pharma industry, our health self-reliance, our defense industry, our ability to deploy at the border which you can only do. You can do that if you create the infrastructure,” he said.

Mr Jaishankar suggested that India’s annual average expenditure on the border with China as of 2014 was around Rs 3,500 crore.

Today it is around Rs 15,000 crore, he said.

“The infrastructure on the border has been neglected, you cannot protect the border if you do not build infrastructure there,” he said.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)