New Delhi: During his visit to the UK, Indian foreign minister S. Jaishankar took the opportunity to sit down to Lunch with the FT, a flagship fixture at Financial Times which has been running for over three decades.
The “steely and erudite foreign minister”, writes FT’s foreign editor Alec Russell, was on a “grand tour of the west”—and seems to be enjoying it.
He has spent the last seven weeks on the move, attending Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Munich Security Conference, and hosting most of the European commissioners in Delhi. He’s the longest serving-foreign minister since Jawaharlal Nehru, the FT observes, and has been a leading voice calling for a shake-up of the world order. Neither his opinions nor his reputation is lost on Russell.
“My guest cuts a dapper, elfin figure and he parries criticism like a champion fencer. As the public face of India’s nationalist government, he can also have an icy tongue,” writes Russell.
On Sunday, the day India won the ICC Champions Trophy in Dubai, Jaishankar sat down to a typical Indian meal at the Taj Hotel in London: upma, masala dosa, parathas and papayas.
“I’m not being entirely facetious, a multipolar world used to be our talking point. It’s now become the American talking point,” says Jaishankar, in one of the opening quotes in the article.
It’s followed up quickly with an example of Jaishankar’s acerbic wit: when Russell reminds him that former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once lauded Jaishankar as the practising politician most in tune with his approach, Jaishankar quips that that’s “not necessarily a compliment”.
As Jaishankar and Russell tuck into their meal, the conversation lightly touches on India’s reputation on the global stage. Russell seems aware that an interview such as this with a top figure in Indian politics is extremely rare—his questions tiptoe around Jaishankar, very obviously non-combative.
And this approach yields insights into his personality. Foreign policy is very much in the 70-year-old Jaishankar’s DNA, Russell writes.
Jaishankar didn’t just want to spend his life analysing what others have done, he wanted to be somebody whose actions others would one day analyse, reveals an anecdote about his father K. Subrahmanyam, a “public servant who was one of the most outspoken advocates of India acquiring nuclear weapons”.
He had no hesitations about joining the BJP—he is “very comfortable with the politics” of his party and is “in sync” with them, says Jaishankar, adding that he came from a “very nationalist household”. And he thinks predictability is boring: the cricket fan in him recalls English bowler Brian Statham, who was so good that he became predictable.
Russell offers some resistance at some point in the interview, quoting the last Indian to have Lunch with the FT—lawyer Indira Jaisingh, who said the “the rule of religion is replacing the rule of law” in India. Jaishankar says he has no response to that other than to “laugh scathingly”.
“We are a secular country… secularism does not mean you suppress your own religion. Unfortunately… it became a political fashion to say that the majority should not express its faith or should keep it within itself,” he says, before repeating that the elitist views of previous generations are now outdated. India has moved on, he adds.
And on the global stage, India is pursuing a “looser form of relationship”, with Jaishankar saying that the new world order is “something more flexible” than the treaty-based old order. He’s also more of a realist, one who doesn’t shy away from being transactional and one who views big issues of principle to be a persuasive or pressure tactic.
“I’m a very empirical person. If I have 80 years of data which suggest a relationship has very firm foundations, I would tend to use that as a working assumption,” he says, referring to India’s relationships with Russia, China and the west.
“India’s boon in this age of fluid geopolitics is to be able to say to the west that it is not China—and to the rest of the world that it is not the west,” Russell writes, before speaking to Jaishankar about India’s relationship with China, who offers a very pragmatic response. India can’t have a bad situation on the border while simultaneously maintaining a good relationship over all, he says—that’s just “common sense”.
“Life is full of what-ifs,” Jaishankar tells Russel. “Sometimes they happen. Many times they don’t. You don’t spend life worrying about what-ifs. You spend your life preparing for what-ifs.”
“The wind of history is at his back for now. On the global stage, just about everyone apart from China needs India, even if it is not so easy closer to home. For Delhi, ever on its mind is the fear that China is stealing a march on it by wooing its neighbours,” writes Russell.
“And whatever shape the field, as Jaishankar appreciates all too well, this is rather a fun time to be an Indian official on tour in the west,” he writes.
The Economist also takes note of Jaishankar’s visit to London, where he “parried criticism of Indian foreign policy with waspish one-liners about western double-standards” at Chatham House.
But one western leader was exempt from his barbs, The Economist observes: Trump.
“Politicians everywhere are scrambling to make sense of Trump 2.0 but India wants to get ahead of the pack by emphasising how its non-aligned stance fits comfortably with America’s new worldview. India is also honing a new art: articulating existing positions with language from the MAGA lexicon,” it says.
(Prime Minister Narendra) Modi’s term MIGA— Make India Great Again—is just one example. But The Economist writes that Jaishankar’s speech at Chatham House not just shows the new dynamic in action, but also exposes some of its shortcomings.
Echoing the FT interview, this article too notes India’s approach to alliances under Jaishankar.
“Without promising policy changes or greater spending, Mr Jaishankar used the MAGA language of free riding to present India as a more straightforward partner than Europe,” The Economist writes.
Another example is minority rights in India: the Trump administration places a low priority on these, while India consistently responds to allegations of religious tensions by insisting it’s a secular country that respects all religions equally.
“But Mr Jaishankar’s speech showed how the terrain has shifted, with India’s top diplomat using the language of America’s culture wars. Asked about discrimination against India’s 200m Muslims, he criticised ‘tokenism’ and ‘identity lobbies’ that ‘cater to minority demands’. Then he pivoted to talking about housing and loans, instead,” The Economist notes.
“Mr Jaishankar’s audience laughed nervously as he made one euphemistic concession: he said American foreign policy is ‘interesting’ at the moment. You will not catch him formulating a stronger critique. After the humiliating encounter between Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, and Mr Trump in the Oval Office, many Indian commentators have argued that Europe should learn from Indians how to talk to Mr Trump. India’s strategy appears to involve talking more like him, too,” the article finishes.
The Washington Post, meanwhile, reports that India might have declared that it’s ready to replace China as the “world’s factory”—but it’s too premature, almost undercutting Jaishankar’s balancing act for India.
“A decade ago, India positioned itself as the prime destination for companies looking to diversify their manufacturing base, known as the China Plus One strategy. Now it is grappling with a sobering reality: smaller countries such as Vietnam have been much more successful at attracting foreign investment,” the Post reports.
The article repeats all the usual talking points about India’s relationship with manufacturing: from bureaucratic red tape to protectionist policies to labour laws, there are several things keeping India from becoming the manufacturing behemoth it once hoped to be.
“Often obscured by the flashy messaging of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s signature ‘Make in India’ campaign is a more complicated story—one of missed deals, stalled investments and companies quietly choosing to go elsewhere,” the article says, before describing India’s brush with both Apple and Samsung.
“The urgency for India is mounting amid a slowdown in its economic momentum. The country is in the midst of an acute employment crisis, unable to create enough jobs for the 14 million people entering the workforce each year,” the Post reports.
It ends by quoting Modi’s aspirations to “fulfil the world’s expectations” and step into the role of a “trustworthy partner that can create high-quality products and has a reliable supply”—a dissonant echo of Jaishankar’s Lunch with the FT.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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