I am not going to Pakistan to discuss bilateral ties, but to attend SCO: Jaishankar

External Affairs Minister says India won’t change stand on boycotting SAARC, criticises Nehru for ‘serious misjudgment’ of Pakistan

Asserting that he was going to Islamabad to attend a multilateral meeting and not to discuss bilateral ties, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar clarified on Saturday (October 5, 2024) that his visit for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) did not change India’s position on boycotting the South Asian Association for Regional cooperation (SAARC) grouping in Pakistan. On Friday, the government had announced that Mr. Jaishankar would represent India at the SCO’s Heads of Government meeting on October 15-16.

“I’m not going there to discuss India-Pakistan relations,” said Mr. Jaishankar, speaking at the annual Sardar Patel Memorial Lecture on Governance organised by the IC Centre for Governance in New Delhi. “I’m going there to be a good member of the SCO. But you know, since I’m a courteous and civil person, I will behave myself accordingly,” he added, smiling, in a possible reference to his otherwise sharp comments on Pakistan. He also explained that by tradition, Prime Minister Narendra Modi attended the SCO Heads of Government conference every year, and it was left to him or one of the Ministers to attend the meeting, dispelling reports that India had “downgraded” its participation at the SCO this year.

India and Pakistan have not held bilateral talks at a ministerial level since December 2015, during former External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj’s visit to Islamabad, which was the last such visit. Since 2019, after the Pulwama attack, and the reorganisation of Jammu and Kashmir, India and Pakistan have snapped most other ties, including trade and travel links, and recalled their High Commissioners.

When asked about India’s participation in the eight-nation SAARC summit, which last met in 2014, and has been held up being hosted by Pakistan due to India’s boycott, Mr. Jaishankar said that it would be tantamount to “normalising” Pakistan’s support for cross-border terrorism.

“We have not had a meeting of SAARC for a very simple reason, that there is one member of SAARC who is practising cross-border terrorism [Pakistan], at least against one more member [India]...,” Mr. Jaishankar said, adding that India decided it would not “normalise” terrorism as a “legitimate tool of statecraft”. He did not however, comment on why travelling to Islamabad for the SCO meet did not fall in the same category. In Islamabad, Mr. Jaishankar will attend the SCO meet along with leaders from Russia, China, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Iran and Belarus.

Praise for Patel

Mr. Jaishankar praised India’s first Home Minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel for his firm handling of the integration of States, and, in particular, Hyderabad and Junagadh, which Pakistan had laid claim to, until his death in 1950, and for his firm stance on foreign policy issues like ties with China and the United States. Reserving most of his criticism for the first Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who served in the post until he died more than a decade after Mr. Patel, in 1964, Mr. Jaishankar said that it was “sad for all of us and the for the nation” that Mr. Patel’s caution against taking Pakistan’s attack on Jammu and Kashmir in 1948 to the United Nations was “disregarded” by Mr. Nehru, whom he accused of making a “serious misjudgment of Pakistan”.

“An India lulled by a sense of false internationalism was set up by the United Kingdom, ably assisted by Belgium, Canada and the U.S., and what began as the ‘Jammu and Kashmir Question’ was conveniently changed to the ‘India-Pakistan Question’, putting the two at par with each other and with attendant implications,” Mr. Jaishankar said in his prepared remarks. He also argued that Mr. Patel was “troubled” by India’s reticence in establishing ties with Israel due to “vote bank politics”, which were only fully established in 1992.

To a specific question about whether Mr. Patel, a nationalist, would have envisaged India as a theocracy or “Hindu Rashtra”, Mr. Jaishankar said that while all religions should be respected, that should not mean that “your own religion needed to be suppressed”, referring to those who he said were “almost defensive about being a Hindu”.

Published - October 05, 2024 03:44 pm IST