Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said New Delhi had a good relationship with major global powers except China, which he said had violated border management agreements.

India’s ties with Russia had been extraordinarily steady despite turbulence in global politics over the war Ukraine, Jaishankar added, in an interview broadcast on Tuesday by Reuters partner ANI.

The tensions with neighbour China had resulted in India having the largest peace time deployment of troops on the disputed frontier, Jaishankar said.

“India’s relationship with major powers is good. China is an exception because it violated agreements has a posture at the border as a result we have a counter posture,” Jaishankar said, referring to India’s military mobilisation and investment in border infrastructure.

The minister’s comments come ahead of the March 1-2 meeting of foreign ministers of the Group of 20 nations (G-20) in New Delhi which senior Chinese government officials are due to attend.

The Asian giants share a 3,500 km border in the Himalayas called the Line of Actual Control (LAC) that has been disputed since the 1950s. The two sides went to war over it in 1962.

At least 24 soldiers were killed when the two armies clashed in 2020 but tensions eased after military and diplomatic talks.

A fresh clash erupted between the two sides in the eastern Himalayas in December last year but there were no deaths. On Pakistan, Jaishankar said Islamabad will have to find its own way out of its financial crisis.

“Our relationship today is not one where we can be directly relevant to that process,” he said about critical funds the ailing South Asian economy desperately needs.

Jaishankar said India’s view that the war in Ukraine needed a peaceful solution was shared by many countries. India has kept a neutral stance on the war, declining to blame Russia for the invasion of its neighbour, seeking a diplomatic solution and increasing its purchases of Russia oil over the past year.

Russia has been India’s biggest supplier of military equipment for decades and it is the fourth-biggest market for Indian pharmaceutical products.

“The world is still very divided on the Ukraine war. Modi wants to create a momentum for peace,” he said, referring to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s willingness to help calm tensions between Russia and Ukraine.

Jaishankar on Saturday hit out at “scaremongering” critics who claim the country’s democracy is being corroded, singling out billionaire George Soros — a popular target for right-wing ire. At an event in Sydney, Jaishankar rejected accusations that multiple “surveys” on the BBC’s India offices showed Modi and his government were veering towards authoritarianism.

Jaishankar defended the prime minister, painting detractors as “scaremongering,” holding an antiquated “Euro-Atlantic view” of democracy and failing to respect the Indian people’s democratic choice.

“There are still people in the world who believe that their definition, their preferences, their views must override everything else,” he said.

Indian tax authorities surveyed the BBC’s offices in New Delhi and Mumbai just weeks after the broadcaster aired a documentary on Modi’s actions during deadly sectarian riots in 2002.

Jaishankar singled out philanthropist Soros, who recently highlighted Modi’s close ties with fraud-accused businesses run by ally Gautam Adani and suggested that while India was a democracy, Modi “is no democrat.”

Jaishankar denounced the 92-year-old Hungarian-born financier as “old, rich opinionated and dangerous” and someone who “still thinks that his views should determine how the entire world works.” “He actually thinks that it doesn’t matter that this is a country of 1.4 billion people — we are almost that — whose voters decide how the country should run.”

Soros has long funded projects promoting transparency and democracy, making him the subject of countless conspiracy theories and politically motivated attacks.

“People like him think an election is good if the person we want to see wins. If the election throws up a different outcome, then we actually will say it’s a flawed democracy,” Jaishankar said.



Agencies