Source : WION
New Delhi : India’s External Affairs Minister Dr S Jaishankar on Saturday (Feb 17) said that it’s difficult to have unidimensional relationships in the contemporary world as the Indian foreign minister repeated New Delhi’s stand over buying Russian oil despite the Western sanctions on Moscow due to war in Ukraine.
Speaking on the sidelines of the ongoing Munich security conference, Jaishankar said that India buying Russian oil should not be a problem for others.
“Is that a problem, why should that be a problem? If I am smart enough to have multiple options, you should be admiring me. Is that a problem for others,” asked Jaishankar with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and German Foreign Affairs Minister Annalena Baerbock beside him.
“I don’t think so, certainly in this case. We try to explain what are the different pulls and pressures that countries have. It’s very hard to have that unidimensional relationship,” he added.
International ties are rooted in history: Jaishankar
While highlighting the historicity of New Delhi’s ties with Moscow and Washington, Jaishankar said that India’s relations are not “unsentimentally transactional”.
“Different countries and different relationships have different histories. If I want to look at the US and Germany, it is rooted. There is an alliance, nature to it. There is a certain history on which that relationship is grounded. In our case it’s very different, so I don’t want you to even inadvertently give the impression that we are purely unsentimentally transactional. We are not, we get along with people, we believe in things, we share things, and we agree on some things but there are times when you are located in different places have different levels of development, and different experiences all of that gets into that,” Jaishankar added.
“Life is complicated, life is differentiated. And I think it’s very important today. I agree with Antony which is, good partners provide choices, smart partners take some of the choices. But sometimes, there will be choices, you say I’ll pass on that,” he stated further.
The 60th Munich Security Conference (MSC) got underway with an in-person event from February 16-18, at its traditional venue, the Hotel Bayerischer Hof in Munich, according to an official statement.
This year’s conference is being held under the chairmanship of the German Ambassador to the US, Christoph Heusgen.
‘We did our service to the world’: FM Jaishankar
Jaishankar also pointed out that a distinction must be made between being non-West and anti-West.
“I think, it’s important today to make a distinction, between being non-West and anti-West, I would not only characterise India as a country, which is non-West but which has an extremely strong relation with the Western countries, getting better by the days. Not everybody necessarily in that grouping might qualify for that description, but the contribution the BRICS has made, if one looks at G7 and how it evolved into the G20,” he said.
"India is non west, but which has extremely strong relationship with western countries", says EAM Jaishankar at Munich security conference pic.twitter.com/CJSH2uV5Jd
— Sidhant Sibal (@sidhant) February 17, 2024
“I think in a way, those additional 13 members who came into this bigger grouping, 5 of them are BRICS members, the fact that there was another group which was meeting regularly and discussing at the meeting, I think certainly was input into the expansion of G7 into the G20. So, I think we did our service to the world,” the EAM added.
(With inputs from agencies)
