“First of all, our economy is not faltering,” he said at the ET Roundtable on Friday. “India is always… India has been a very unique country… I would say actually, in the history of the world, that it’s been a society which has been very open… different people from different societies come to India.”
Jaishankar also cited the Narendra Modi government’s legislation that facilitates such a welcome. “That’s why we have the CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act), which is to open up doors for people who are in trouble… I think we should be open to people who have the need to come to India, who have a claim to come to India.”
The minister then went on to rebuke those who were critical of the CAA. “There are people who publicly said on record that because of CAA, a million Muslims will lose their citizenship in this country,” he said. “Why are they not being held to account? Because nobody has lost citizenship.”
He said a segment of the western media, which is “very ideological”, wants to shape the global narrative and is therefore targeting India.
“It is a segment which has always believed that they should control the global narrative,” he said.‘Political Hit Job’
“They have made in many cases no secret of their political passion,” Jaishankar said. “They have indicated open preference for other political parties in India. They have waded into specific issues, taking up positions. If they give comments and judgements, you want to take it recognising where it is coming from. I mean, these are not objective judgements. These are people who very openly declared that they have a stake in what is happening. They believe they have a role in what is happening.”
In this vein, the poor ranking of India on press freedom was a political hit job, the minister said. Calling the US college protests over the war in Gaza “illuminating”, he said, “We got a lot of lectures about how to deal with the public every time there’s an agitation in India.” “I invite you to see the television pictures today on the screen. So, I mean, to me, to put it very mildly, what they preach, what they practice, what is their agenda, what is their objectivity, or lack of it? I think those are the realities. So, you might say this is public organisation or… some think tank giving a report. It’s politics by other means. So, I recognise it and I will call it out.”
On press reports that blamed India for targeted killings in Pakistan, he said, “Terrorists are there in large numbers. Statistically, where they will be in large numbers, things will happen to them. Now they have created an industry which is the terrorist’s industry… things could happen there.”
The minister described Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a leader who comes once in a lifetime. That conviction had led him to switch to politics after a diplomatic career, said Jaishankar, who was the foreign secretary from 2015 to 2018 and became the external affairs minister in 2019.
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