'Vote bank politics will not dominate foreign policies', says S Jaishankar

|HT|

External affairs minister S Jaishankar said those days are gone when vote bank politics will dominate foreign policies and India's present stand on Israel is evidence of that. "The conflict between Isreal and Palentine has been going on for ages. We have some political reasons owing to which we did not further our ties with Isreal. We restricted ourselves. PM Modi was the first PM in the history of India to have visited Israel. The entire country knows that we could have benefitted from the ties. But once you come out of vote bank politics, your foreign policies also get impacted. Gone are those days when vote bank politics dominated national interest," Jaishankar said.

Jaishankar was speaking at the launch event of the Gujarati translation of his book, The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World. He took many questions from the audience at the event.

On India's population, Jaishankar said the rate of growth of India's population is falling very sharply, the reasons being education, social awareness etc. "Each one of us with the passage of time -- our family sizes are smaller. It is a part of evolution. Forced population control can have dangerous consequences. You can see in some countries, their gender balance is disturbed. That is not in the interest of any society. I feel, see..democracy has its shortcomings; sometimes people get frustrated with it. But for all its difficulties, any day, democracy is better than non-democracy. And the solution to issues like population control has to be democratic. Those who forced it are regretting it today," Jaishankar said.

Jaishankar said when PM Modi goes abroad, he visits all the modern infrastructure of that place to see how those are working. "Railways, bullet train, convention centre etc -- he took a ride on the bullet train himself; he went to see how South Korea was cleaning its polluted river; he visited Berlin's railway station; when he was in Singapore, he got the idea of a smart city. The mindset of the government has changed. We are open to what good is happening in other countries," Jaishankar said.

Talking about India's decision to continue buying oil from Russia, Jaishankar said people do not understand the situation of India -- the income level here. "The issue of oil import was more of people's interest than foreign policy. PM Modi's instruction was we need to think about our people first," Jaishankar said.

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