As a follow up to her question on China and the West’s ties with India, the panel moderator sought to assert that India strengthened bilateral relations with Quad members “at the very least” as a post-Galwan answer to China but Dr Jaishankar reminded the audience that the “incarnation of the Quad” started in 2017 and that it is not a post-2020 development. India’s relations with the Quad partners “have steadily improved in the last 20 years,” he said, adding, “Again, as I said, you are making it seem like cause-and-effect. I would challenge that.”
The entire course of the conversation indicates that the agenda at hand was to show India’s position on the Russia-Ukraine tensions as hypocritical and manoeuvre India into perceivably admitting the same. Lynn Kuok, who comes from the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a British think tank, sought to do her job first by posing a direct question on whether India believed in “different principles for different parts of the world” and when that did not throw Dr Jaishankar off, she seemingly sought to establish the notion that the West had done undue favours for India in the Indo-Pacific and so, in turn, India should return the love in Europe. But that ‘trap’ too did not reap any success with India’s astute foreign minister.
Words are the weapon of a diplomat, especially a foreign minister- and how he or she wields them can make or break a country’s justification of its foreign policy stands. Any unsuspecting rookie would have taken the kind of bait laid out for Dr Jaishankar, but his words were calculated to the T and his stand was not compromised at any given time.
