"World is today a more difficult place to navigate, world is heading towards greater insecurity", says Dr Jaishankar

 "......You don't have to be a political scientist or a diplomat today to understand that this is not a world of one power or two powers, that there are many more countries today in the fray. And that, in many ways, while very welcome, also makes the world a more difficult place to navigate and to manage," says External Affairs Minister Dr S Jaishankar.

"At the same time, if one looks at the economic challenges of the world, today we are really looking at the consequences of what happens when trading rules are gamed, when competition has been unfair, and when actually the insecurities of the COVID era have caused many geographies, many regions, many big economies," he notes.

In his address at the Annual General Meeting of FICCI here on December 9th, Dr Jaishankar said: 

"Today to talk in terms of strategic autonomy, in China they call it dual circulation, in America they call it foreign policy for the middle class, in Europe they call it strategic autonomy, but the fact is today the world is heading towards greater insecurity and more protections".  

Extracts:

"We are, all of us, today meeting at a very important juncture, an important juncture because we have entered the Amritkaal. We are also at the end of a decade of the Modi Government. We have made big decisions but clearly we are poised to make many more. We have nursed big ambitions, we have implemented much of what we had promised but again there are still a lot that we have to achieve. 

So to me, Viksit Bharat, it is both a vision to achieve as well as a set of specific goals and the short description of it would be really how to make India a developed country in the next 25 years.

Let me start with the domestic side. I think all of you would agree that while much has happened, much good has happened, the fact is also that the last decade has been quite tough. It was tough because we began it a decade ago with a lot of economic clean up that was necessary, especially on the banking side. 

I think in many ways, faith in governance, faith in the business climate, faith in a desire to invest, I think all of that was flagging a decade ago. 

Some of it was the slow pace of change. Some of it was also that in our own minds we were still comparing the pre-reform period to the post-reform period, whereas we had actually done 20 years of reform and our standards of comparison, our benchmarking should have been something else.

**  **** "....As someone who has travelled even during COVID and has travelled after COVID and has seen how other societies dealt with it, I can say with a lot of pride and with a lot of justification that India actually came out of COVID strong, that we were able to respond to it and we were able to respond to it in an amazing way because I remember as part of the group of ministers...

, we were five, six of us who were tasked with dealing with COVID and you know, the first few weeks and months, I mean I can't even describe to you the feeling when you realize that you actually have, do not have that ability to deal with what is coming.

Since as COVID receded, in fact, it wasn't just the bounce back, the social, the psychological bounce back that we saw. 

We also saw actually a very fast return to very robust economic growth. And the transformation which began a decade ago, that transformation once again picked up steam".

***

"Now politically, when we look at the world, the talk is increasingly of a multipolar world that people know. I mean, you don't have to be a political scientist or a diplomat today to understand that this is not a world of one power or two powers, that there are many more countries today in the fray. 

And that, in many ways, while very welcome, also makes the world a more difficult place to navigate and to manage. At the same time, if one looks at the economic challenges of the world, today we are really looking at the consequences of what happens when trading rules are gamed, when competition has been unfair, and when actually the insecurities of the COVID era have caused many geographies, many regions, many big economies.

Today to talk in terms of strategic autonomy, in China they call it dual circulation, in America they call it foreign policy for the middle class, in Europe they call it strategic autonomy, but the fact is today the world is heading towards greater insecurity and more protections. 

And the nature of how trading rules have been implemented over the last two to three decades actually have raised a lot of question marks about its effectiveness and the credibility of the regime. So this, in a sense, is the scenario that we confront. And as the Minister of External Affairs, and obviously a large part of my attention, the economic side of my attention, is very much on how we deal with the world economically, how we support our businesses, how we support our consumers, how we increase our employment. 

I think as a government, there is one thing on which we are very clear, and we are clear on this, that while opening up to the world may be good, because nobody disputes the reality of globalization, we all accept that opening up to the world is good, but opening up to the world must happen only when there is a level playing field for our own industry at home. It cannot be at the cost of our industry.

Jaishankar and his counterpart from Singapore: Venue UN, 2019