Jaishankar is a promoter of Indian features in international relations

 Jaishankar is a promoter of Indian features in international relations

Dr. S. Jaishankar, the minister of external affairs, emphasized on Saturday the need of investing more time in learning about India's rich cultural heritage and argued for incorporating Indian traits into international interactions.

 

Speaking at an educational facility in Pune, he was part of the 'International Relations Conference on India's Strategic Culture: Addressing Global and Regional Challenges'.

In order to establish international relations with Indian characteristics, he posed the following question: "Is it not necessary that we dedicate more time, attention, and energy to actually looking at our repository of culture, knowledge, history, and traditions in order to develop an Indian strategic culture?"

The long-serving minister supported this with anecdotes from his discussions on Afghanistan years before with his American counterparts.

"I discovered that American perceptions of Afghanistan were influenced by British accounts, even after I had spent 20 years there. I asked him whether you had ever pondered why Peshawar is where it is, and if so, if that was also the case for you. He questioned whether the Durand Line was really significant despite the presence of British colonial architecture.

The international land boundary between Afghanistan and Pakistan is known as the Durand Line.

He added that Hari Singh Nalwa, the legendary Sikh warrior of Maharaja Ranjit Singh's reign, was unknown to those who had lived their "lifetime" in Afghanistan. On the Afghan border, Nalwa commanded the Sikh army as its supreme leader.

And it provides some insight. This indicates that they have taken a cultural perspective while studying geography. They will never see it from a viewpoint that serves our interests until we correct our perspective, according to Jaishankar.

He said that although many Western academics accept "5000 years of unbroken Chinese history," many others would not provide India the same "privilege" and comprehension. The External Affairs Minister said, "In fact, Churchill himself gave an extreme example of this when he said that India is no more a country than the equator."

Jaishankar said that modernity and "Westernism" are often associated with one another.

"We employ terminology like Trojan horses, Gordian knots, and Pyrrhic victories in our everyday lives. They are not only used, but we have also, in a sense, made them ubiquitous. In general, British customs, institutions, and intellectual conceptions predominate.

The intellectuals Socrates and Plato are the ones whose names first spring to mind. "When a politician from Europe speaks about permanent interests, people will cite Lord Palmerston, but they won't recall that Kautilya stated the same thing centuries earlier," he remarked.