He was just two days away from his retirement from the prestigious Indian Foreign Service when Dr S. Jaishankar was appointed as India’s foreign secretary in 2015. Little did anyone know that this low-key foreign secretary will one day rise to the position of Minister of External Affairs. He wasn’t the first career-diplomat to take on a political role, Natwar Singh is the first but he definitely is the first foreign secretary ever to become Minister of External Affairs and assume a political assignment without ever being a part of active politics. In fact, he was elected from Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat, only after he was chosen as the Minister of External Affairs.
The ascendance of Modi government has brought India’s bold side to the fore. PM Modi’s personal style is one marked by assertion, confidence and self-belief but as a PM, Modi has many limitations of being diplomatically nice. It is this limitation that Jaishankar overcomes by calling a spade, a spade. It is the savagery of Jaishankar that makes him the best choice to be the foreign minister of a leader like Narendra Modi.
As a young International Relations student, nothing frustrated me more than the hypocrisy of the West especially in terms of their analysis of India’s democracy, its foreign policy choices and its rightful place in the world. This is a sentiment with which most of my peers would also agree, provided how much our generation has been conditioned to internalise the criticism by the West. For such an IR community in India, Dr S. Jaishankar is no less than a Superman. He says things that need to be said, he points out aspects that need to be highlighted and he leaves no chance to expose the hypocritical West and its dominance of the international system.
In the last few weeks, his statements have completely bowled us over and silenced the West for the best. For instance, “human rights" have been a perennial stick for the West to beat the non-western countries with. West, especially the United States, has used its entire diplomatic energy to shame China globally over its human rights record. This is similar to what India is facing now. But S. Jaishankar set the record straight by explaining how human rights are not just the US’s area of concern, India as a responsible and the largest democracy also keeps a track of the US’s human rights situation. This highlighted how human rights are a two-way street and India is not going to accept West’s judgement of the same.
Another time Jaishankar won hearts was when he told the US media that instead of India, it must be Europe that should be questioned over its oil purchase from Russia because what Europe buys in an afternoon is what India buys in a month. In a similar statement, he told visiting British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss that India must not be shamed over its oil arrangement with Russia because even after 2-3 months, the list of buyers will be the same and India won’t be anywhere in the top 10.
One of the best statements that Minister Jaishankar made in the last few weeks was on the “rules-based order" at the Raisina Dialogue. He was being repeatedly asked to explain India’s stand on the Ukraine-Russia crisis and how it is undermining the rules-based order when he said, rules-based order was under challenge in Asia as well but the West gave India advice to “do more trade", at least India is not giving the same advice! It seems he was making a sly reference to Chinese incursions across LAC but it can also mean Pakistan with whom West has always advised India to engage in a cooperative and trade-based relationship despite its record of threatening India’s security by being a state sponsor of terrorism. He minced no words when he said that what’s happening in Europe has been happening since the last 10 years in Asia with the Afghanistan situation, West’s abandoning of the Afghan people to Taliban and rising aggression of China. But Europe never heeded until chickens came home to roost.
S. Jaishankar has been pretty consistent in calling out the hypocrisy of the West. Many would remember how he spoke about colonialism’s dark history in India when India faced two centuries of humiliation unlike China’s single century of humiliation with British looting close to US $45 trillion in today’s value over their 190 years of colonial rule.
He has also alluded to the dominance of western concepts and norms in the functioning of the world in his book, The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World. According to him, the non-West such as India, China and Japan have always been under constant pressure to live up to the western standards. While decolonisation has always been a favourite topic for IR academics world over, S. Jaishankar gives it a practitioner’s impetus when he says that India should stop seeking approval for its actions anymore. In the last 75 years, India has fulfilled a global responsibility by being a thriving democracy and the next 25 years are all about how India leverages its external environment. Indeed, in a multi-polar world, with a multi-aligned foreign policy, India should spend more time chasing its own interests instead of caring about pleasing others.
The author holds a PhD in International Relations from the Department of International Relations, South Asian University. Views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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