EAM S Jaishankar
CHENNAI: India has every right to defend itself against terrorism in the manner it chooses without having to explain itself, external affairs minister S Jaishankar said Friday while talking about what it means to live with “bad neighbours and good neighbours”. “If a country decides to deliberately, persistently and unrepentantly continue with terrorism, we will exercise our right to defend our people. How we exercise that right is up to us. Nobody can tell us what we should or should not do,” Jaishankar told a gathering of IIT Madras students at the launch of the institute’s Global Research Foundation. Referring to the now suspended Indus Waters Treaty with Pakistan, he said goodwill couldn’t coexist with hostility. “It was a gesture of good neighbourliness. But if you have had decades of terrorism, there is no good neighbourliness… You can’t say, ‘Please share water with me, but I will continue with terrorism’. That’s not reconcilable,” the minister said. Jaishankar said India also had “good neighbours”, citing instances of supporting and standing by them in times of need. He mentioned sending Sri Lanka vaccines during the pandemic and $4 million dollars worth of aid for cyclone relief. On his recent visit to Bangladesh, with whom India has lately had a fraught relationship, the external affairs minister said, “I went to pay my last respects to Bangladesh’s former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia. Most of our neighbours now know if India grows, all of them grow. That’s the message I took to Bangladesh.” Jaishankar described India as “a human-resource power” that “should play to our strengths”. “When institutions of excellence in the country start going abroad, the business of foreign policy will have a huge addition to the arsenal,” he said, referring to IIT Madras going global. When a student from Arunachal Pradesh wanted to know what India did when a woman with an Indian passport from the northeastern state was harassed at Shanghai airport, he said, “We protested this incident. Arunachal Pradesh is and will always be a part of India.”
