Aakar Patel | It's time to rethink India\'s role in the world; if it\'s helping us
Deccan ChronicleThe Indian government has abstained from calling for an end to the violence in the Gaza Strip in a UN General Assembly resolution in order to avoid upsetting the United States. In 2014, the BJP manifesto said it would “strengthen Saarc” and that India’s states “will be encouraged to play a greater role in diplomacy”. This approach comes from a series of speeches made by Subrahmanyam Jaishankar on things as diverse as China’s rise to power, India’s lost decades, the Mahabharata, maritime power and the Covid-19 pandemic. Another reason that he was unable to come up with a name for it as clean and understandable as, say, “non-alignment”, could be that this was no real foreign policy at all. It is not easy to escape the conclusion that Mr Jaishankar provided the sophistry to cover what was essentially random and directionless behaviour by Prime Minister Narendra Modi passing off as foreign policy strategy.