Union Minister for External Affairs Dr S Jaishankar addresses the inaugural session of the Growth Net 7.0 session in New Delhi (Express Photo by Tashi Tobgyal)A large majority of people in India recognised that India’s stature in the world has increased in the last five years, External Affairs minister Subramanian Jaishankar said Thursday.
Speaking at a seminar in Delhi, the ex-foreign secretary talked about his prior experience as an outsider, saying “the government certainly looks different from the outside than from the inside.” Jaishankar became a part of a long line of career diplomats taking the political plunge when he joined the new government as the External Affairs minister in May this year.
Jaishankar said the previous five years of the Modi government has kept alive and even strengthened the expectation of change in the country, adding that a “global rebalancing” is taking place and the “sharpest manifestation” of that is the rise of China and to an extent, the rise of India as well.
“Across the world, you have had broadly a growth of nationalism and reasons are very complex, that nationalism has been validated electorally in many places. At one level each is different, but somewhere there is a message out there,” he said, while discussion globalisation and the changing global economies.
The former US Ambassador has been one of the most active diplomats in the Modi government and steered the government’s agenda across the world.
A 1977 batch Indian Foreign Service Officer, Jaishankar has previously served as Indian ambassador to US (2014-15), China (2009-13) among other European nations, and had a major role in the negotiation of the ambitious India-US civil nuclear agreement. The longest-serving foreign secretary is credited for forming the crux of Modi’s foreign policy in his first term as the prime minister.
