‘Tell me which country should we join’: Jaishankar says India never aligned with any power, even when it was weaker

Even when India was weaker than what it is now, it had decided to not align with any power, said External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar at an event. He made a strong case for strategic autonomy and called it the need of the hour, when the entire global order has been thrown into chaos.

“I mean when we were much weaker, we didn’t do it. There is today no case to do it,” he said, referring to aligning with a power centre. He was attending the Aravali Summit hosted by Jawaharlal Nehru University's School of International Studies on the occasion of its 70th anniversary.

“Imagine if you were not today adopting strategic autonomy, please tell me which country in the world would you like to join and put your future in their hands. I can’t think of anybody. If you can, I would like to hear it. To me, my interest is best secured by maximising my options, maintaining my freedom of choices, and handling change continuously…meaning you have to keep revising, you have to keep refreshing, keep adjusting, keep recalculating…and you can’t do that if you are tied to somebody else. You can do that when you are fundamentally the master of your own destiny. So I would argue that the more volatile the world is, the more turbulent the world is, the more unpredictable it is, the whole global order unravels, the case for multi-alignment or strategic autonomy actually becomes stronger, not weaker,” he said to a question asked by a JNU student.

“And this idea that sitting on the fence – the very use of the phrase talks as if the land does not belong to you. But you get off the fence and you land on somebody else’s land. So at some point we have got to carve out a territory for ourselves, and say okay I have taken a stand,” he added.

He said one should call out the idea that freedom of choice is equated with indecision, which is a clever subtext for saying alignment. “I think we should call it out,” he said. 

Jaishankar, responding to a student said India has found itself in a similar situation earlier too when it was boxed in by US-Pakistan-China. There was only one side then, our side, he said.