West used Goldilocks principle on India, will have to change its approach as India rises: Jaishankar

Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell icon to get the latest updates. It is a pleasure to be back at the Atlantic Council. Let me begin by acknowledging two people who are not here but who, for me, in many ways, was the commitment when I was ambassador and before, Fred Kemp and John Huntsman, and I am delighted to meet many of you, but I am particularly delighted to see the ambassador's remains in the plan because we both work on the type of issues I am going to address. to talk about when we were both in the administration, so look, when I thought I should comment on, you know, a whale of your invitation, I felt like I should really address what the core mission of this institution is, which initially, as I understand it, It was an organism that was created. to promote transatlantic understanding and then it has grown beyond that to take on the responsibility of engaging the world beyond the transatlantic world as well, so my comments today are really foc

used

on those sets of issues that, in a sense, are Could you say how India relates to the West, how is the West expected to relate to India and where are we going now?

You know that many of you would

have

heard the term "a century of humiliation" in another country. India actually had two centuries of humiliation by the West because the West, you know, in its predatory way came to India in the middle of the 18th century and continued or almost exactly for two or a hundred and ninety years after that and it was interesting, I think. that a year ago there was actually a very serious economic study. who tried to estimate how much the British took out of India and in terms of value, and some very calculated mathematics ended up calculating a figure of 45 trillion dollars in today's value, which should give you an idea of ​​what really happened in those two hundred years, so while we'll talk about all the things we shared today.

The reality is also that the history of India and the West is also a history of famine, slavery and the opium trade, so there is a very dark side to all of this. Matt McGann D.'s 150th birthday is almost on October 2, it is actually the birth anniversary and I think it is worth pausing and reflecting on how a leader like him really

change

d India's attitude towards the West which in If it had not had the kind of relationship with the West that it had later, we can debate its merits, but I think it is extraordinary in some ways that a country that has fought for so long for its independence has reached an informal agreement or pact. in a sense with the West and I would think of that as really the ability to put history aside and allow yourself to know the politics and the economics and the social connections to take control of what you don't see in India and

have

n't seen for a long time. time.

The last 70 years, even in the most difficult times with the West, has been a kind of mobilization around a type of anti-Western nationalism that has actually been in many ways, I would say, cordial relations, if they were not cordial, suddenly They stopped being frictional and Part of that was also the way that we established our own institutions and created our own society and, at the end of the day, the fact that we are a liberal democracy, the fact that there is a governance model based on a rule of law, the fact that there is social pluralism and that we are a market economy, I think all of these were really very powerful factors that really allowed us to leave that history behind and here I would like to point out one thing before moving on to my next argument , which is that India's choices in 1947 and later, actually took what were Western values ​​and practices and made them almost universal, so that today, if you have in the developed world of the South, whatever you really call it , Asia, Africa, parts of Latin America, if you have the belief today that democracy is an ethically superior model of governance it is due in part to the fact that the first major postcolonial political entity actually chose that and then maintained it despite of the extraordinary odds of the last 70 years, so let's look at the last 70 years and these last seventy years.

It really has been a very complex story on one level. I would say that the West has actually been very supportive of India's growth. The rise of India. If you could see that in politics, you can see that in security, trade, investment in services, education. Know, particularly in the 50s, 60s, 70s and the assistance to the development of various cards, you can see that in the way that the Indian diaspora is located, particularly the more modern voluntary diaspora, and I would say that you know this from the 40s to maybe late 90s, I mean. Let's say that the 20th century in that sense was a period in which actually what I described as a cordial and frictionless relationship was very much at play and I think it has played a very valuable role in building the India that we have today , but what we have said is what I would call a sort of Goldilocks era of our relationship, where the West didn't want India to get too weak, it didn't want India to get too strong, so it stirred the pot.

Indian pottery or tried to stir Indian pottery is perfect and sometimes you know it says there were margins of error on both sides, so you actually have a very interesting situation where, when India in 1962, after the conflict in which We were defeated, actually the West comes to India's aid, but in less than a decade in 1971, when it seems to the West that India is seeking primacy in the subcontinent, the West opposes India, so there is a kind of width of bandwidth in which the relationship operates, now this bandwidth is not just episodic. I mean, if you look at where our relationship was right and where we didn't to a large extent across the development spectrum, the West was very supportive, but when it came to industrialization, particularly in the heavy industries, or in regarding defense and security.

The West was very conservative, so there were geopolitical or political moments, as well as sectors in which there was something very interesting, I would say almost a relationship management, and today, if you go to the archives and know a lot about where is the thinking? internal or multiple administrations? Are they there for people to access? I think it was actually laid out most clearly by President Eisenhower, but you can see lines of it before him and after him through multiple administrations, but this idea of ​​how does it hold up? at stake a week the bad thing about India for the United States Overly strong Western interests India is also a problem of some kind because of the way in those days they were mainly concerned with a weak India, so this, in a sense , was the type of scenario that was experienced during the 20th century and now at some point. the way that that started to

change

and I

will

talk about that, but even though it has changed, I think that some of the structural issues where there are divergences between India and the West continue to be visible in trade it is visible in rights issues intellectual property can be visible sometimes in issues of nonproliferation freedom civil rights you know what cause you support what cause you don't, sometimes we look at situations where we say you know why is why the West in general and the U.S.

Leaving aside the that it is a visible violation of rights, there would be times when some of us, in some way, would be asked the same question and, for me, the conclusion is that, for everything we have in common, we must also recognize that We come from a different place and we have different histories so a lot of the challenge today for us is to reconcile that so having said what our current conundrum is from the Indian side I think there is a clear sense that you know the power of the West continues being very strong that if you look at the world the institutions the regimes the rules the practices the narratives of the world are still largely shaped by the West The West under the international systems of rights international system in many ways really governs the global Commons also in many ways , but having said that, what has been visible particularly in the last 10 years and in the case of China perhaps even before there was a rebalancing underway, the rebalancing was accelerated by the global financial crisis of 2008 and what we initially seen As an economic rebalance, today it has become a much broader cultural rebalance, I would say, also a strategic one, and if there is a unique way to capture that it is the fact that today the g20 has really replaced the g7 as Although now I say that the West still retains great dominance over the international system, it is also a fact that we see a much more divided West and part of the reason is that the United States has been the glue that holds the West together and Western use, the broader sense of term, you know, I mean, I would call Japan in that sense as part of the West or maybe Korea, so I use the, you know, it's not really a geographical or ethnic definition, but I get the Alliance builds or the OECD also forms part of it, so today, as the world becomes more multipolar, the West is also becoming more multiple and that is a very interesting dynamic.

When you look at the West, I now see two proposals, one of which the West needs. India needs India because India is an additional engine of growth. That market access is important. That India's human resources

will

be more relevant to the world. That we will move to a multipolar world. multipolarity by having good relations with multiple worlds the fact that in many areas there would be some type of burden sharing you can already see that, for example, we hide our operations in our part of the world and then in global issues it is important to work towards a country like India and I think nothing illustrates that more than the radical change and what happened in Paris, but having said that, I would make the reverse argument: India needs the West and India needs the West for a variety of reasons, but I would give the simplest historical argument for that is that every major growth story in the last 150 years has actually, paradoxically, happened with the support of the West, so whether it's the rise of Japan, even the rise of the Soviet Union or the rise of South Korea.

China's ASEAN, all of this would not have been possible if it had not been done in conjunction with Western interests and Western thinking of that period, the direction of the global economy would also be a stronger argument for this body because as we move forward towards a world In the case of a world with a more knowledge-based economy, one with greater technological interdependence, clearly an important factor would be the flow of talent in the world and that would suggest that, in reality, India has a position both unique with a V between the economies of the West, so the question of which flows From all this it follows that it is possible, it is likely that there really will be a new pact between India and the West, because if this rebalancing has to be reflected in a different balance, in different equations, in new methods of mutual work, is there any possibility?

There is actually an idea of ​​how to solve that, which brings me to the next question: what will it take to reach that new pact? and, obviously, the first point is to understand that a new pact is necessary. I think the understanding is strong today in the United States. I see that, to some extent, in Japan. I see less in Europe, but moving in the right direction, so it's even the awareness aspect. It clearly needs more work and to develop this further now, when I say what is needed, I would say that awareness, first of all, must translate into recognition of the need for a new balance, which means that there really are different types of collaborations , different conversations and in All this, obviously, India would protect itself enough to ensure that it will always have a visibly strong initial position in the West, so that the fact that India has other actions and other activities does not detract from what which at the end of the day will be sort of a central aspect of the direction of its foreign policy there are other aspects of what is needed and one of them is also the understanding of a changed India, a changed India, that democratization in the last 70 years in India has had its own impact, which if you look at India today, the politics of India, the social aspects of India, they bluntly express that the old elite is now out of business and you really have a new group of people there, you know different thoughts from theirs, you know the meaning of the roots that relate to the world obviously in a different way. of the people who dominated the Indian political scene before that, a third aspect from the Indian point of view would be how to know what a part of it is like, how to build bridges and there the role of the diaspora would be very important. important, but increasingly what we can see is that the treatment of the diaspora abroad becomes a factor in the responses ofIndia to a particular country or society, so I see that not only as a conversation between India and its diaspora but also a factor in our relationships with other countries and other partners now and, in a sense, that's it, It is a two-way factor because the diaspora is also related, in particular, the Indian diaspora is much more related to the development in the country of origin than many others;

For us, that's something we can discuss. If there is interest, you know from the Indian point of view, as I said, in the past we have noted the fact that the current world order is largely based on institutions and practices that were advanced, that were created, shaped and socialized. by the West, but frankly we also look to the future, I mean, our feeling is that the theories about the decline of the West are wildly exaggerated, if you look at technology, if you look even at defense budgets, if you look at the will to exercise power in All this if we look at the new instruments of pressure that have appeared on the international scene in the last ten years, in all this, the West largely maintains its leadership, so the task that What we have ahead of us if we want to move in this direction is, of course, to strengthen our convergences and today there are very obvious issues to work on. together issues such as counterterrorism issues such as maritime security issues such as connectivity, but there will also be divergences and I think part of the challenge would be to manage them, many of them would arise in situations of third countries such as Russia or Iran and some of them also It is to overcome the history that one of the burdens that I would say that India carries is the fact that it was not a part, it was not a central part of the 1945 border, it was not at the top table at that time, so how can it be done make the world more contemporary, how can the world order be made more contemporary?

And here I would say that the West is very interested in doing that, but obviously it is not an easy task, the symbol of that is a UN Security Council, but that is not the only facet of that particular document, so I would end with a final observation which is that as India itself

rises

, today we are the fifth or sixth largest economy, which would certainly be the third largest economy, even in nominal terms. by 2030 we will be the most populous country in less than the next five years, so the question we asked ourselves and I guess in some ways the world is asking itself is really what kind of power would India be and I think a big part of that answer is obviously with that, but I think part of that answer is also with the West and, in my opinion, the kind of relationship that we now see together would really give us a complete picture, so why don't I leave my comments there and I would be happy to take more ning.

Thank you very much dr. Josh Anchor, essentially for giving us the giant head doctrine and you know what it was, it was going to be a fascinating conversation anyway, has been elevated by his willingness to engage in really previewing a strategic vision of how the India relates to the West. in the 21st century under his leadership and the leadership of his government. Thank you, Ambassador Singler and your embassy team. All of you honored guests, we are so grateful that you took the time this morning to join us, so I'm going to ask you. to the minister a couple of questions to start this conversation and then, of course, open it there.

You can indicate this using his name if you want to ask a question. I'll be happy to call you and again, just a reminder that this is on. the record so that dr. gently, let's start in a softball sense if the correct theory that we understand will get the gorillas started in a minute, but starting with the Prime Minister's appearance at President Trump's visit in Houston to which a very full meeting Vitas Damon alluded bilateral and multilateral talks in New York and then last night with Secretary Pompeo, in the evening he will probably leave, we will leave Washington and if the United States has a much clearer idea of ​​how the West, as you have described it, is thinking about India at this particular time.

What are the real challenges in getting the US-India relationship to where you would like it to be? Would you be willing to give us a little read on what you take away from this long series of meetings over the years? Last week, first, my meetings are not over yet, so I still have a few more secretaries left, so I will meet with the secretary as I believe tomorrow and with the new NSA, as well as with the acting secretary of Homeland Security, and I will be bringing together many issues. in different formats, but look, what I mean is that I would put my areas of interest in two broad baskets, one would really be the politics of the West, particularly the internal politics of the West, because it bothers me to say that the Western societies that we have today An active debate would be an understatement of the year, each of them, in some way, has it as an ongoing activity, but it is actually very important, in my opinion, these few years will probably also take us in a very different direction that in the past, that's very obvious and it's also obvious, it's very differentiated, you know, I spend a lot of time in Europe, not only in this job, even in my previous job, and you can see today that if you take the breath of the political spectrum both to the left as well as to the right, I mean, on both sides, actually, there has been a kind of expansion, so I think, to a large extent, that also applies to American politics and when you know that the two extremes meet expand, obviously in each case there are much sharper arguments, but our concern is not to enter into those arguments because we look at the aggregate result and where the individual power centers and nations are located. stay collectively and that really brings me to the second basket and the second basket is really the economic technology basket, if you will, because I think the rate of social change in the world is so extraordinary today and the importance of technology, does it? what will happen when it holds a promise that is actually beyond our imagination - if we thought back every five years, we couldn't have imagined where you were there and what effect that has on our relationship, because in India you know we can't grow as much old.

This way we can't go up the manufacturing ladder and then industrialize it and then scale it up, so we're going to have to do a unique combination of shortcut jumps of you know improvisations, so if you were to ask me, what's it like? India is going to grow, you know? Would it be manufacturing? Would they be services? Would they be new companies? Would they be skills? Would they be exports? We'll end up in that situation and that sort of India and this much more differentiated complex West that they're coming together is really a proposition that has a you know it's very desirable, but it's clearly not just.

It is not inevitable but it is not easy, it will have its challenges, I mean there will be problems, there will be decisions that we will make and as you know some segments here may not like it, it would also work the other way around and we will have to accept our problems. As we try to forge better and different relationships, after this trip I leave even more fascinated by the inner discourse of the places I visit, but I also leave confident in everyone and, as you know, in all the conversations I had I discovered that there are One if there are some issues that everyone agrees on today, certainly the idea that they know the Western world and especially the United States, which as I said have been the intellectual leaders in that direction, the fact that our relationship today has a strategic meaning, I think it is a livery.