India is often like a "punching bag" for its South Asian neighbours, said the country's External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar.
In response to a question on India's relations with neighbouring countries, he said it is a complex neighbourhood and the relations at times are impacted by the interplay of politics and sharp positioning, reports our New Delhi correspondent.
Jaishankar made the remarks during an online interaction with leading Indian industrialist Sunil Kant Munjal and academician C Raja Mohan on CNBC-TV18 channel last night.
"We need to create those structural linkages between us and our neighbours so that they take care of political cycles and any volatility their politics may produce," he said.
"Because, very often people say things about us. We are actually like a punching bag for the domestic issues, which one of our neighbours is having."
Jaishankar said, "I would say the sensible thing to do is to make sure that you have strong structural linkages so that the politics of the day plays on but the realities of the economics and the social interactions and the people-to-people contacts carry on."
"Having said that, I would take a lot of care with my neighbours to kind of smoothen the frictions as they come along. Sometimes you anticipate problems, sometimes it is important that you do not get provoked," he added.
He said the free trade agreements (FTAs) India has entered over the years have not been able to largely serve the country's economy well in terms of building its capacities.
Jaishankar said there are ways of engaging the world which do not necessarily have to be "FTA-centric".
He, however, added that all the FTAs are not the same.
He said that the world will be heading towards a more protectionist economy post Covid-19.
About China, he said the economies of India and China were roughly of the same size when the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had visited Beijing in 1988.
However, now, China's economy is about four-and-half or five times that of India largely due to a series of reforms the neighbouring country initiated around 40 years back.
Jaishankar, a former ambassador to China, said India too grew "fairly significantly" during the period.
"But the fact is that we did not get ourselves intensively industrialised, or pushed manufacturing the way many other Asian economies did. The fact is that we opened up very much later, we opened up a full decade-and-half after China did," he said.
https://www.thedailystar.net/india/...hbours-says-external-affairs-minister-1933865
