Bengaluru: Wooing defence ministers and their deputies from 27 countries with indigenous solutions for defence-related issues, India Tuesday stressed on not giving sermons or cut-and-dried solutions to problems faced by them while ensuring that they don’t fall into a debt trap.
Hosting the Defence Minister’s Conclave on the sidelines of the Aero India event, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh said India stands for a rules-based international order, in which “the primordial instinct of the might being right is replaced by the civilisational concept of fairness, cooperation, respect and equality amongst all sovereign nations”.
Addressing over 160 delegates from several countries, including defence ministers and deputy defence ministers, 15 defence and service chiefs and 12 permanent secretaries from 80 countries, Singh described collective security as “sine qua non (essential condition)” for development and prosperity.
‘Don’t believe in paternalistic, neo-colonial paradigms’
He underlined that terrorism, illegal arms trade, drugs smuggling and human trafficking pose significant security threats to the world and stressed on the need to devise new strategies to counter them.
“India does not believe in dealing with such security issues in the old paternalistic or the neo-colonial paradigms. We consider all nations as equal partners. That is why, we do not believe in imposing external or supra-national solutions to a country’s internal problems,” he said.
The defence minister highlighted that India doesn’t believe in “giving sermons or cut-and-dried solutions, which do not respect the national values and constraints of the countries in need of assistance”.
“Rather, the country supports the capacity building of our partner countries, so that they may chart out their own destiny, in accordance with their own genius,” Singh said.
He said that there are nations which are richer, militarily or technologically more advanced than others, but “it does not give them the right to dictate their solutions to the nations in need of support”.
“This top-down approach towards solving problems has never been sustainable in the long run and it often leads to debt trap, reaction from the local population, conflict and so on,” he said, in an oblique reference to China.
India has been pushing for increasing its defence exports. At the inauguration of Aero India show on Monday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had emphasised on fast-tracking India’s journey from a defence importer to an exporter. The prime minister said the government is targeting an increase in defence exports to $5 billion by 2024-25 from $1.5 billion currently.
In the aerospace sector, India is looking to export indigenous air platforms like Light Combat Aircraft (LCA)-Tejas, HTT-40, Dorniers, Light Utility Helicopter (LUH), Light Combat Helicopter (LCH) and Advanced Light Helicopter (ALH).
India is already in talks with Argentina and Egypt for the sale of Tejas aircraft while pursuing a deal with the Philippines for the Advanced Light Helicopter.
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