Without naming Pakistan, external affairs minister S Jaishankar has said that India’s western neighbour was confronting a crisis due to long term issues and “multiple chickens had come home to roost”.
He also said that the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (Saarc), which hasn’t had a summit since 2014, was an exception at a time when India had stepped up its regional and global cooperation across formats because one member continued to believe it could practice terrorism “at no cost”.
Asked about Pakistan’s current crisis — the country is both confronting a severe economic challenge and political instability — Jaishankar first spoke about how countries in different parts of the world were going through different crises. He pointed more specifically to the economic crisis in Sri Lanka and how India had stepped in to help with its biggest bilateral lending assistance ever to help Colombo tide over the crisis.
“But the unnamed country to our west, their problems are much more long term, they are much more deeper historically in terms of what happens when distortions have been introduced in natural progress of an economy. If you have, let us say, excessive expenditure on the military, if your borrowing hasn’t been prudent, if your infrastructure doesn’t pay its way. There are lots of factors there and multiple chickens are coming home to roost at the same time.”
Asked if India was planning to use its diplomatic momentum and engagements to energise SAARC, while outlining Delhi’s initiatives across the region and straddling both older and newer initiatives, Jaishankar said, “SAARC is an exception. It is currently dormant because one of its members, which shall remained unnamed, believes it can practice terrorism at no cost. But that is pretty much the exception.”’
