India’s history with the United States is a very troubled history, said Minister of External Affairs Dr Subrahmanyam Jaishankar at the CNN News18 Town Hall. “A lot of India’s problems with Pakistan are directly attributable to the support that the United States gave to Pakistan,” he added.
On the relationship with the US, Dr Jaishankar said that the United States in the 1990s was very dominant but today the US is able to actually say that India has a different history and it has to take India’s relationship with Russia into account. “Part of the reason why Quad has worked is that the four of us have given each other that degree of latitude and understanding,” he went on.
Anurag Thakur was the first speaker at the CNN-News18 Town Hall on Saturday, with Minister for Women & Child Development Smriti Irani and External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar spoke at the event later in the day.
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India’s history with Russia is different from that of America, Japan or Australia and everybody in the Quad does not have an identical position on everything, “Had it been the case, we would have expected everybody to have the same stand on Pakistan as ours,” he remarked.
Dr Jaishankar wondered that if it was indeed about identical positions, he could ask the other three members of the Quad why their positions on Pakistan are not exactly the same as India’s.
“We are today in a pragmatic, get-on-with-it world where you look for people with whom at a very basic level your interests match, and we have a common agenda. For example, the Quad is Indo-Pacific centered. It does not extrapolate into something else.
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The Minister of External Affairs also remarked that India is reclaiming its place in the world. “We are Indians, we are a 5000-year-old civilisation which is a modern-era nation-state, which is reclaiming its place in the world, but it’s still a process, a very challenging process,” he said.
“It is very hard to overcome 200 years of colonialism, it’s a paradox, we often think of the psychological or the cultural attraction of colonialism but we do not think of the enormous damage to our societal fabric, our economy,” said Dr Jaishankar.
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