Without naming Pakistan, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar has said that India’s western neighbor is facing a crisis due to long-term issues and that “several chickens had come home to roost”.
He also said that the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc), which has not held a summit since 2014, was an exception at a time when India had stepped up its regional and global cooperation in all formats because one member still believed it . could practice terrorism “at no cost.”
When asked about Pakistan’s current crisis (the country is facing serious 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 largest bilateral credit assistance to date to help Colombo tide over the crisis.
“But in the anonymous country to our west, their problems are much more long-term, they are much deeper historically in terms of what happens when distortions have been introduced into the natural progress of an economy. If you have, say, excessive spending on the military, if your borrowing has not been prudent, if your infrastructure is not paying off. “There are a lot of factors there and several chickens come home to roost at the same time.”
Asked if India planned to use its diplomatic push and engagements to energize SAARC, while outlining Delhi’s initiatives across the region and covering both older and newer initiatives, Jaishankar said: “SAARC is an exception . It is currently inactive because one of its members, whose name will remain anonymous, believes that he can practice terrorism at no cost. But that is practically the exception.”
Discover more from PressNewsAgency
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.