 Thank you for inviting me today. I believe the idea is to give some ideas to those who are likely to take the personality test. Those who have taken the main examination and they are waiting for the results of the main examination. While you are trying to familiarize them with the kind of questions that will arise at the personality test. And I understand that is the purpose of this exercise. So what I propose to do is to give a bird's eye view of Indian foreign policy right from the time of independence till today. And what I would expect is not for the candidates to be asked to give this narrative like that. That will never happen, there will be no time for it. But as I narrate there will be several key phrases and names and dates which would be very useful for them. There are so many catchphrases like non-alignment, disarmament, decolonization, development, human rights. And these are all ideas which will come up in these conversations. But if I start by saying something about the personality test itself. All of you must have heard that the common saying that the personality test is not meant to test your knowledge. Because that has already been tested. You would not be there at the interview without having given a satisfactory performance in your written papers. Plans as well as names. So the whole purpose of the personality test is to get an idea of your personality. It used to be called Vaivavosi or interview. But you change your personality test because this idea of how you respond, what your judgment is like. And how much can you justify or argue your case satisfactorily? And what are your instincts? What is your integrity, honesty, judgment? So these are all the things that they are watching while you are speaking. So more important than what you say, it is how you say it and how you express yourself. Because they have never seen you before, you have come out successfully in this test. And so they would like to know before you join the service what you look like and whether you have the personality, not in terms of physical personality, but in terms of ability to bear these huge responsibilities. As you know, the civil services catch people young. You are still very young and they want to know how much responsibilities you can take on. It may be good that you are a good student or a good scholar, but that's not enough. And whether it is the foreign service or the IAS or any other service, you deal with the public. And all the more reason why they should know what kind of personality versus. In my time long ago when I took the personality test, the marks were 1500 for the foreign service and 1000 for the others. So at that time the interviews or the personality test was much more important than it is today. While you have only 275 marks, so the personality test may not matter as much as it used to in my time. So if you've got a very good percentage out of 1500, there's a good chance of you being in the service, even with a not a glorious return paper. We had one or two return papers were weak, but was able to make up by the interview months. But that benefit you don't have now. And in a way it is good because we have written your papers well and even if you don't do so well in the personality test, you may still be able to make to the service. So the secret of the interview is basically to have an easy conversation with the board. The board is composed of people from different backgrounds, different interests, and they look at you from their angle of interest and specialization. So what you need to do is to satisfy all their needs in the sense it could be a psychiatrist there, foreign service officer there, to be a police officer there. So all of them have different interests and they don't look at you from that perspective. So you have to satisfy all of them in that sense. So it's good to address all of them, make them aware that you are addressing them to not just the channel. And just say that this is an ordinary living room conversation. And if you can do that, it's very easy. But if you take it as a tough question and answer session, then you are likely to go wrong, you are likely to bluff. Here, if you don't know something, you gloss over it, well, that's another issue that we talk about there. Or you can simply say you don't know it, we can ask another question. So there are some, these are some techniques I'm sure many people must have told you about all this. Did I just thought I'll mention these because that's very important to know and you are not to be worried about the information that you have. All that you have already used. But the best thing is to keep reading newspapers even after the results come and read it also that morning. Because the board members will be full of what they read in the times of India that morning. And therefore, if you know what was in the times of India, that should happen. Anyway, so let me move on to essentials of foreign policy very briefly over the period of time. So the fundamental thing is, you know, the foreign policy was laid down by no less a person than by whichever lecture. That's very clear, everyone knows about that. And what is the speciality of under each other? Because it has these two books which I am sure all of you have read, if you have not, please do. One is The Glimpses of World History and the other is The Spurred History. And don't forget that these books were written in jail without an internet connection. So you can imagine how much he knew about these subjects. To write it from his own memory as it were. On the soul of India and also the essence of global affairs. And that's why he was the most equipped person to create a foreign policy for ourselves. But the Congress party already had some views just as democracy was inevitable. Non-alignment was also inevitable for India. That's the background in which we come from. So Pandit Nairu put it very clearly on 1947, August 14 midnight. He said that I will be working as Prime Minister of India for the welfare of my country. And to advance my own interests, my country's interests. But I will always be conscious of the fact that our dreams are also those of the dreams of the world. So he gave it an immediate international perspective for India and its foreign policy. And you will be surprised to know it was the same words that Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in spite of all his differences with Pandit Nairu, he used the same words in the last speech of the General Assembly. He said I am working for India but I am also working for the rest of the world. So almost identical expressions. So that is where you have to see. Because the world is, we have seen India as a part of the world. And we have seen, looked at the world, not with the idea of getting, gaining something from them. Well, that is helpful. But also to offer something to the world. What we have, our ancient wisdom, everywhere you will hear, a wisdom of India, Bhagavad Gita, Buddha, Mahatma Gandhi, Javel and Nairu, Aravindra Ghosh. All these names people here. And all these have, they resonate very well in many situations. I won't say all over the world but educated people all over the world are aware of these things. And then even when India was not so prosperous or not so important internationally, we had this advantage. And so Pandit Nairu knew very well that he could not have supported either the western bloc or the eastern bloc. We have just liberated ourselves from the eastern, western bloc. And why should we go and again become a part of the western ideology. And similarly we are not keen to keen about communism, communism was also very popular in India. Though Pandit Nairu himself had some interest in the 10-year policy of development. And he was also a little bit of a socialist. But still he was not keen about aligning ourselves with Soviet Union either. And that is how it was a natural conclusion that we should form a non-aligned policy. It has undergone many changes. People now think that there is no scope for non-alignment because there are not two blocs. Personally, unipolar world. But even if it is a unipolar world, there is a meaning in having a non-aligned policy, which means the policy to be independent in thinking and action. That is the essence of non-alignment. Not that you are not aligned with A or B. So even if there is nobody to be aligned to, the idea is that your decisions, your policies, your approach to the world will all be your own decision, not forced on you by anybody else. So has it served our interests? That is the second question. There you have to think in terms of what is the purpose of foreign policy. I am sure if I ask you, you will give different portrayed purposes, thinking community abroad, image of India, so many things you will say. But I don't know how many of you will say that the purpose of foreign policy of economic development of the country. You may say that is the purpose of administration or the purpose of release, etc. But in actual fact, if you think about it, a foreign policy is also determined by our economic needs. Two reasons. Why? Because one, you need peace. You need a peaceful environment to develop. If you have a war with China or Pakistan every third day or third month, then you cannot have any development. Even if you build development over a period of years, three days war or ten days war will destroy our country. So the first and foremost thing for development is an atmosphere of peace and calm. And that is the purpose of foreign policy, not to create tension or conflict and to result that. So if you do that, if you do not have a tension or conflict, if you have no enemies in this world, then you can safely develop better and you don't have to think about wasting resources on different systems. And therefore they say when diplomacy finishes, diplomacy fails, war starts. So the idea is of Indian diplomacy or any country's diplomacy is that war doesn't start. You can see what's happening in Ukraine today. Everybody is trying to see, it's not the brink of war, but everybody is trying to see that war doesn't take place because sanctions will come, black shirt will be there, economy will be collapsing and all these considerations. So important foreign policy is very important to keep the peace for the sake of development. And the second point is no country in this world is self-sufficient in everything. Even the richest country in the world takes the United States. Do you think they can survive without, because now they can probably survive without oil, but they cannot survive without many other resources that they get from the world? And do you think the United States can survive itself without Indian technology and Indian technocrats? You know, how many millions of Indians are in the United States building that country? So no country can do everything itself. You need a place like developing countries, you need financing, you need technology, you need expertise on various issues, you need collaboration, you need investment, so many things that you need. So when you become a diplomat, the first thing is when you are posted to a particular country as parts of about 12 or 14 countries and each time what do you do first? First of course after knowing a little bit about the country, its culture, language, history, etc. Then what you look at is, what is it that you can get from that country? It's not the same thing that you can get from US on the one hand where I served 10 years and Fiji or Kenya on the other, I also served as an asset. So each country, our interests are different, our capabilities are different, we are seen differently and so each posting you are supposed to adjust yourself to the requirements of that country. Of course the government normally gives you an outline as to what you ought to gain but most often they will not even say it to you, it is not very well that in Fiji you cannot get technology for India but you can get support for the goodwill of the people or you will be able to lead the Indian community in the South Pacific. So each country has its own requirements. So what do we do? What does foreign policy do and what does it try to do? Is to give the minimum and get the maximum out of that country because if you give away whatever you have to that country then what do you have left with? So like negotiations everywhere, even at home, every day you are negotiating. What do I get if I do this? What do I get if I don't do this? What are you willing to offer to your brothers or sisters for them to be nice to you? So there is always an element of negotiation in our human life and this is similarly true about foreign policy too. So that is you have good relations with people around you and you cannot choose your neighbours, you cannot choose, you can only choose your friends and therefore you have to adjust yourself to the circumstances. You find out your needs and try to gain as much as possible from the position that you have. So when we started I would call say from 1947 to 1962 if you take as one chunk of the history of India's foreign policy. This is the period I would call a golden era in Indian foreign policy. My own name, I just got into it because I have no time in history because India is so popular in the world. Now we are a powerful nation, we have nuclear weapons, people dread you, people know that you have clues for the goodwill of mankind, climate change, blah blah. But I don't know these ones there at that time. At that time what we had was first of all the reputation that we won freedom against the British by without firing a shot, peaceful, non-violent struggle to have conquered the British Empire. That was a good image that we had. Then you know when the UN was formed there were only 52 nations, members in the UN now there are 193 and where did they all come from? There were all parts of other countries or colonies. So all these were colonies when India became independent. So India was a kind of light, a load star for all these developing countries which were poor and being mistreated by the colonial powers and generally in misery. So India was a big attraction to be able to throw the colonialists out of the country, build your nation yourself. And then we projected our interests as global interests. What were our interests that we projected into this? Number one was disarmament. Why disarmament? Because the world was threatened by two blocks and anytime a nuclear war could break out. People had already seen a nuclear war in 1945. And therefore disarmament was a very high priority. Of course what we, what Pandit Naru advocated was complete disarmament which meant that except for a little army to look after your borders or whatever, there should be no weapons, no nuclear weapons of course. So general and complete disarmament is what we advocated. And that made it bigger people. The decolonization was another important objective of India. We wanted the whole world to be decolonized. And that was the main achievement of the United Nations itself in the first few years. And India was at the forefront of that. And then equitable distribution of wealth, the economy, global economy and global human rights. So in all these we projected the needs of the world, not the needs of ours but actually what we were doing was we were pursuing our interests because if the world does not disarm, we have to build up our arms. So the idea was that if disarmament is achieved and nuclear disarmament is achieved then India won't have to spend money on nuclear research or to build a bomb or to do various other things. So this was virtually we were pursuing the interests of India when you talked about disarmament. Same about decolonization. We wanted more and more countries to be independent. And join the non-aligned movement. So from 1962 the movement became formally. And even before that we had this non-aligned concept and many countries were adhering to that Asia Pacific, Asian Security Conference in Indonesia. And the Asia Pacific concept came, China was with us. We were trying to get China into the United Nations because Taiwan was still in the United Nations for many years and India was the champion and our plan was to get China to be integrated with Asia and the Pacific and Prime Minister Nehru thought that India and China would work together and build a new world that was his dream. So that is why that period I said from 1947 to 1962 we had a great time. India was sought after everywhere and in the United Nations itself there were many Indian diplomats who became part of the UN and served the UN very well and so on. So these ways could also be called an idealistic phase because of the way we approached issues. Approach China for example. We did not even dream that China will one day become our worst enemy or our worst adversary. And in fact Americans were wondering why India was getting so close to China. What has India got to do with China? So it was an idealistic phase and it ended very fast because in 1962 with Chinese aggression our weaknesses were revealed. We really lost that war and it was revealed to the world that we are not capable. We had no capacity, we had not taken care of our defense and nothing succeeds like success and we did not succeed and it was a disastrous phase. And so we entered the next phase after Pandit Nehru we had Lal Bahadur Shastri because he had only a very short time and then we had Indira Gandhi and that is the phase we can call a pragmatic foreign policy phase. The second phase of course it arose out of a failure of foreign policy that we wanted to create but we suddenly faced this big attack from China and we turned around for help and we could not get help, much help from the non-aligned countries even emotionally there wasn't much help and everybody was trying to just make peace telling each country to give up, to make concessions so that the war could be ended and aggression could be ended etc. But then fortunately China quickly made a ceasefire and started withdrawing and it was except from about 40,000 kilometers of our territory in Aishin and still climbing territory in Arunachalcoviz but for that they were due to what is now known as the line of actual control. So that we got some breathing space there but ironically at that time the only country which came forward to helping to have arms and armaments and ammunition was the United States it was an incandescent massive amount so we don't remember it and we think of Americans we think Americans are colonialists and imperialists but they came to our rescue, to an extent but they came of course for their own narrow interests because they wanted communism to be stopped, they wanted China to be subjugated and they thought they could use India and help in the war and make China weaker. But China was cleverer than that and they withdrew and there was no explanation till today as to why they did that they were going to withdraw then why did they take so much of India's territory and the explanation given by China is that this is to teach India a lesson and even in 2020 when they made it Ladakh the explanation was this is to continue to teach India a lesson they have never said what is that lesson but the lesson is very obvious what they mean is that India should not become the leader of Asia because they want to be the leader of the world and for which their first step is to become the leader of Asia and then they want to become the leader of the world they have the BRI, Belt and Road Initiative and so many other projects to build up their influence by throwing money at people what's called the Silver Bullets Diplomacy they don't send out bullets but bullets with silver on it so that the money is attractive and therefore they are in that process but so therefore China became our rival, not an adversary and so things became bad and that became a major preoccupation for India and the Chinese of course tested a nuclear weapon in 1964 maybe we could have done it also at that time but we didn't do that though we had the capability and also the Americans were encouraging us but we did not do that on a matter of principle as part of our ideological phase and it was of course Mrs. Gandhi during her pragmatic phase that she tested for the first time so what are the features of this period we should take this all the way from 1962-1990 till then I think we had a very good relationship with the Soviet Union because the whole world believed that we were just a slave of the Soviet Union and so we were answerable to them for everything we are not non-aligned, we faced all that criticism but if you look at objectively you will find that the Soviet Union was the only country which offered things that we needed we did not have foreign exchange so we were interested in a kind of barter arrangement in which we could get technology, machinery, equipment, education all that you needed to build a nation we needed from somewhere and the western countries were not giving it to us and otherwise it was very expensive which could not afford it and fortunately Soviet Union without insisting on an ideological sacrifice from our side they did not insist on our signing the Warsaw Pact but they were very happy that they had a friend outside the communist world and India was an ideal country for that so they helped us nation with nation building as you know the entire machinery, equipment, production base starting from, you know, trip building to nuclear energy and everything we got not with foreign exchange we did not have but with ordinary things we had you know the Ludhiana sweaters and Panama cigarettes things like that nobody else will buy you know the western countries only bought handicrafts from us, nothing else but these people were willing to buy consumer goods from us because their own quality of consumer goods were not that high and they could make use of the Indian consumer goods and so the rupee ruble arrangement was a very good one and ideologically also the colonization, anti-apartheid, pro-Palestine so these are some of the postures that India had and other normalised countries and therefore Soviet Union was considered a natural alarm of India and the normalised world so for purely practical reasons not ideological Mrs Gandhi put a lot of eggs in the so we had to pack, so we had to basket and it served us well particularly in 1971 Bangladesh war because if we had not gone to Bangladesh war by ourselves we would have been friendless it was even possible that US and China could have intervened at some stage but we signed this famous treaty of India so we had friendship and cooperation treaty which many people thought was a deviation from the non-alignment how come you go and sign a treaty which says that one country will go to the other countries if a third country attacks us what is it other than a military pact people asked but Mrs Gandhi said I don't care a damn about what you say about it but as far as I am concerned I am interested in India's own security and fortunately those Russians never came and fought a war in Bangladesh but they were very much there under the sea and the submarines they were ready even as the American fleet wanted to move into the Vibhne of Bengal they were sure that below them there were the American Soviet submarines so that prevented any kind of intervention and we managed to have a successful war which improved our reputation and improved our security because we are two Pakistanis on both sides I have not spoken about our relations with Pakistan yet but this was a major problem so among other things the international issue was in the United Nations but that is another subject but anyway the victory in Bangladesh served our security purposes global security, name or capable nation or capacity for defence and as a reliable friend grew and many countries wanted to cultivate relationship with India but still our relationship with the Soviet Union was the most important and was the most helpful but then lo and behold most unexpectedly the Soviet Union collapsed and nobody had predicted it the Americans, the westerners were spending millions of dollars to study the Soviet mind they were trying to block Soviet Union from broadcasting their message around the world the Cold War was at a height and in spite of that we managed to maintain fairly decent relations with the United States and the western world and basically depended on the Soviet Union and then this shock came to all of us particularly to Prime Minister Narayan Narasimha Rao who had taken over as Prime Minister at Mrs Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi and that is when we had this collapse of the Soviet Union which was a disaster as far as I am concerned because our best friend, our biggest support just disappeared from the face of the earth remember talking to Mr. Narasimha Rao those days he looked like a man who had lost everything but he had the courage and the wisdom because he had Dr. Manmohan Singh on his side and he built up a new India and that is what I will call a modern India or a liberalized India the collapse of the Soviet Union led us to that face and so from a bipolar world become a unipolar world Mr. Narasimha Rao changed our policy drastically just itself to good relations with the United States because there was nobody else to be friendly with there was no great power to help people and therefore we established full diplomatic relations with Israel we opened up a mission in Israel we worked our relationship with the United States through the Jewish community which is very impressed with India we used the Indian community near about 2 million people at that time to build our relationship so we discovered our other capabilities in adjusting ourselves to a unipolar world and even today we can say it's a unipolar world but there is tough competition from China so soon after this when we felt that oh thank God the Cold War was over and then the permanent five in the United Nations will be able to work together and they work together you know the first Gulf War we work together all of them work together and therefore they were able to liberate Kuwait for the first time UN did something really effective because the permanent members including China were of the same mind which did not last very long and so that beautiful world emerged but sooner than later the Chinese dragon started waking up and a whole lots of problems came upon us we tried to be as friendly with the Chinese as possible during Rajiv Gandhi's visit in 1988 of course the problem of the border was there we had fought one war several skirmishes etc and a lot of energy was being wasted on defending our borders which are not demarcated and we try to demarcate it because as long as your border with your neighbor is not demarcated there is a possibility always of incursions if not repression so we tried that many levels of consultation started in 1958 and still continuing very high level discussions with the Chinese authorities at various levels so many proposals that they were holding at Sai Chin okay we said you keep at Sai Chin but leave I am not your brother let's have some understanding but they kept playing with us like a cat plays plays with a mouse give you some hope, let you go and then catch you again and that kind of a game has been going on and it's going on even today so in 1988 we came to an agreement with the Chinese leaders and that we will not push for the solution of the issue of the border issue but we will try to normalize the relations otherwise which was not a practical thing to do but we had no other choice we started developing trade relations environmental issues human rights issues etc we started cooperating with China it was not a friendship but it was a working relationship but China kept its distance it had a necessary role and tried to hit us where they put particularly on the border on the question of Tibet on the question of India's relations with the United States so the emerging China as it became more and more powerful that became our main objective so our policy certainly shifted we still have good relations with Russia but now our biggest partner is the United States and this was basically because of China China virtually pushed us into the arms of the United States and the United States also confronted with a confrontation from China because they would like Russia depended on India to counter the United States and now the United States would like to use India to counter China and we also have no choice and therefore we have really become closer to the United States and that has caused this problem because China has become more aggressive towards India they built up their relationship with Pakistan in such a way that Pakistan can be used to counter India and Pakistan had such relations with China like the Prime Minister of Pakistan is just going to China this week and so we have two enemies both are nuclear powered and we went in for a nuclear test in 1998 which virtually destroyed our relationship with the United States because the United States was hoping that we will not declare ourselves a nuclear weapon state so for a period from 1988 to 1998 to 2000 there was a very hard kind of relationship with the US the US wanted us to sign the CTBT and the NPT I hope you know all these words and expressions so we were refusing to sign the NPT because it was discriminatory treaty and also because we felt that if others want nuclear weapons for their security how can India not have nuclear weapons and the second best of course is to have a nuclear umbrella from a nuclear weapon state like Japan or Germany they don't have nuclear weapons but they have a nuclear umbrella and those allies of the Russians have their own nuclear umbrella etc so before we decided to make our own weapons we approached both the Soviet Union and the United States whether they would provide a nuclear under the service which would mean that if somebody attacked India with nuclear weapons or threatened to attack India will you come to our help and sadly sad to say and they both refused and it is then that Mrs. Gandhi launched her program in 1974 she tested and said it is a peaceful nuclear explosion but in 1998 Mr. Vaishwari exported he said this is a nuclear weapon and we are a nuclear weapon state so which meant a lot of problems to the Soviet Union over the United States and took us two years from 1998 to 2000 to bring about some normalcy in the India-U.S. relations because of the famous talks which you stopped Albert with Deputy Secretary of the State Department I am sure you know the name and you should remember the name and also Sri Jaswant Singh who was our own first the chairman of the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission and then as the foreign minister so they talked in 18 places 22 times for two years and came to some understanding on India's nuclear policy because the U.S. worry was that India would join the nuclear arms race become a powerful nuclear weapon and will become a threat to the United States so in these two years what Mr. Sri Jaswant Singh impressed upon from the United States was that this was a deterrent for us not an aggressive so we declared a non first use policy because if nobody attacked us we would not attack anybody with nuclear weapons even though that was not a very comfortable position when it comes to China or Pakistan but still we declared that and we declared that we are ready to join the disarmament movement in case other countries gave up their weapons we will also give up our weapons all these understandings and so called benchmarks were established between the United States and India and that led to the famous nuclear deal under Dr. Manmohan Singh in 2005 and that went on till 2008 when it was signed and that brought in a new relationship with the United States but till soon after that we did not sign the agreement for fighter aircraft which President Obama wanted so when he visited in India he found that India was not very forthcoming so he was with the cheese dog with India and from 2010 to 2014 there was some kind of a love in India-U.S. relations but still things went on all our cooperation and other programs went on but the Americans were not too happy and that was the reason why an Indian diplomat was insulted taken to jail, disrobed and all kinds of things that we had about that time that was the rock bottom of India-U.S. relations then it picked up and it was picked up thanks to the present Prime Minister when he became Prime Minister even though he had a history of criticism by the Americans because he criticized him for what happened in Gujarat when he was Chief Minister he refused him a visa to visit the United States three or four times he had to visit the United States of course he had visited in 1999 when I was there I met him there and he had come as a functionary of the BJP but he was not a great leader at that time after that after he became Chief Minister he could not enter the United States and so he should have been a very angry person because of the U.S. Christians but he was not the first opportunity in fact the Americans of course went to his home and gave him a visa, thank God so he never talked about that period when Americans were refusing him a visa why? because Mr. Narendra Modi established his priorities his priority was development security Indian nationals abroad our economic development are self-sufficient so many priorities he had in his prime minister and when he looked at the whole world he found that the only country which can satisfy all these needs was United States so he went full force to establish a kind of personal equation with Barack Obama it was called Obama-Modi-Bromance which lasted till Obama was in power so Obama gave up his anti-India stance and that is basically because in 2015 he came to India a second time the first American president to come to come a second time American presidents go only to countries only once because their own allies more than once but countries like India no president of India has come to India a second time but Obama came in 2015 and that was a surprise to everybody not only that he came as a friend because he was the chief guest at the republic day because you know American presidents don't come to the republic only because they are not invited but even if you are invited they won't come because they have to sit on the street of Rajpath on the side of Rajpath without anything on top of there except the Shamian and McClain's will be flying over them so it's a great security threat if a big falls onto the American president there will be a world war and so nobody wanted to take that risk even we did not want to take that risk we invited our best friends to the republic day and so when Obama accepted it in spite of the security risk it was a big surprise and the secret was revealed later because President Obama was trying to get India involved in an arrangement with the Indo-Pacific or Asia-Pacific because the threat from China was huge there so the beginnings of a quad were in mind so they had this whole idea of an approach to the Indian Ocean through India but Dr. Manmohan Singh was not very keen to embrace that and so it had not worked out very well so the quad idea was already there at that time of India, US, Australia and Japan becoming some kind of a group or a dialogue security dialogues and joint activities etc but making sure that the Chinese did not feel distrusted because Chinese had a big mistrust of all these four countries and therefore we were very careful India did not even support the quad and certainly kept away from it whenever there was a talk of becoming a military alliance but for all practical purposes we slowly and gradually became an ally of the United States which made us very popular with the western world with good relations, business good relations with France, Germany various other countries and so virtually became part of the western world we started of course we are still buying more weapons from Russia but we started buying weapons from Israel we strengthened our relations with Israel and started buying weapons from the United States which is their main target if you want to be friendly with the United States or Russia even if you don't need them because if you don't buy weapons they are not very friendly to you so Mr. Modi started by ordering some weapons from the United States and when the Russians showed some displeasure at that he ordered more weapons from Russia including theirs for hundred missiles so this balance of weapons trade was also maintained trade relations improved and lo and behold the pandemic came which upset the whole thing the whole global trade market has changed and this globalized world and the unipolar world etc. is all upset on itself so we are in a new ball game in the from 2019 most unexpectedly the pandemic hurts the prosperous countries the rich countries the white countries because it was always the belief that if a pandemic comes or an epidemic comes it will always come from the developing world it will come from Africa, from Asia, from Latin America President Obama used to talk about a possibility of a pandemic arriving by plane from Hong Kong and things like that but it was the other way the pandemic arrived from New York to Hong Kong that's what happened most unexpected and therefore the whole balance the economic balance of the world not upset the Americans appeared to withdraw from the leadership of the world and there was China accepting the new role of leadership in the world in spite of the fact that they were at the top that they created the Wuhan virus if not at least they did not tell the world about the Wuhan virus for the first 4 or 5 months and therefore they had done a big disturbance to the to the rest of the world and on top of it they prevented meeting on the Security Council to consider measures to fight the epidemic so they became as though they were the ambassadors of the epidemic because they were not allowing the United Nations to do anything and the whole global system collapsed and each country was trying to do something we were trying to make vaccines somebody else was making and we were exporting some to some people others were exporting nobody knew which vaccine was gold and still we are wondering which was good and whether it is good in the future all these problems persist and if only China had not stopped the Security Council from meeting on this issue we would have had a collaborative fight against the pandemic COVID-19 so now we are in a new world together all these experiences we have but we are groping in the dark what is it that we need to do when the Chinese aggression took place in 2020 the obvious choice was in the United States I did not mention Trump but during Trump's administration Mr. Modi maintained the same good relationship with Trump because he had with Obama nobody had expected that in fact with Trump because Trump is an easier man to please because he is an egoist factory who would like very much so Mr. Modi encouraged him in that he even said that Trump will be the Trump Sarkar will be ugly bar next time it will be Trump Sarkar is declared he went to that extent and he brought him to Guidharat and he claimed that there were only the million people in the Guidharat stadium it cannot take more than 100,000 all these exaggerations and he was very supportive of a few things that China and other countries were criticizing us for article 370 citizenship law even a riot in Delhi when Trump was having his banquet with our Indian president and he did not mind it he did not talk about it he quietly left so he was very friendly and the man behind us at that time was the Secretary of State Mr. Pompeo he was like a front soldier for India he visited India he said we are with you and that was a golden period again because of the circumstances and so we started a three pronged strategy to deal with China first one was negotiations because war is not an option for us with China we do not have the strength we are not balanced and so we started building up our capability but at the same time we were willing to talk and we talked right from the beginning at every level of the foreign minister only Mr. Xi Jinping has not met Mr. Modi everybody else has met everybody else and our foreign minister must have met their foreign minister many times but nothing happened little bit of disengagement but still they are holding Indian territory so our problem number one is is China we do not talk about it every day but the fact is that they have not withdrawn from the territory occupied in 2020 the agreement was that they will go back to de facto position of August 2020 but nothing has happened some withdraw some casualties bad there was not even war with guns people beat up each other and so on we did a bad case and we also withdrew from some areas which belong to us and they also withdrew some areas but now we are stuck because the Japanese sorry the Chinese are not lengthy our second strategy was to have economic sanctions we tried that we withdrew certain facilities very clear for Chinese firms to operate in India and that was the other strategy we tried we failed in that because we suddenly realized how dependent we were on China that is pharmaceuticals and other trade for example India was virtually buying everything from China because it was cheap and people were deprived of so the move to stop all imports or investments from China did not work and so we are still continuing the conversations and at the same time building up our capabilities trying to talk to the Chinese out of any kind of aggression and it is very clear that Chinese have no intention I don't know what they are looking for we will be able to deliver that we don't know and so that has become the position so we are closest to the United States as of now politically militarily ideologically to a certain extent but the Chinese the American response to India is not as strong as it used to be during the President Trump's time because Mr. Biden is a Democrat he has known India he has visited India we always wanted Democrats to become presidents because of some romantic attachment but if you look at the history of India installations you will find that it is the Republican presidents who have been more friendly to India than Democratic presidents starting from Eisenhower President Bush all of them were more friendly with India than the Democratic presidents who spoke nicely to us but they did not offer us anything much so same of the same story about Trump of course Trump did not give us a trade agreement if he wanted but in other cases he stood by us particularly in the case of China but now we are in a dilemma because President Biden has not made up his mind as to how he should deal with China he knows China will create problems for him but he calls himself a rival rather than an adversary he doesn't consider it an enemy he thinks that he will have to cooperate with China it is a lesson that we have also learned and so we do not have the kind of support that we had from President Trump in the case of China and also within the Democratic Party there are very many people who believe that India is moving away from democracy and that we have some majoritarian tendencies in India so they are friendly with Prime Minister Modi they are not particularly comfortable with some of his policies so for these two reasons we cannot say that we have the same kind of relationship with the United States and Russia we have all the cooperation it goes on President Putin was there came to Delhi even during the pandemic because he had not gone out of Moscow except once to go to Geneva to meet the President of the United States so the fact that he came to India was the second place that he went out the pandemic broke out it showed the importance that he attaches to India and we ordered more weapons from them and our Prime Minister visited Vladivostok the Asian part of Russia and extended some credit to that region and set up a corridor Chennai Vladivostok corridor for shipping and so many good things have happened even when he came here he signed something like 26 agreements but in the cracks when the issue of Afghanistan came even though we were supportive of Soviet Union in two instances and Soviet Union was in occupation of Afghanistan and the period when Taliban was in power we were very great supporters of Soviet Union and later Russia but when he came to a breaking of relations with Afghanistan Russia left us in the large so now what is developing is China, Russia Iran, Pakistan Afghanistan kind of an axis this is a first rate security problem terrorism will increase and the United States is withdrawn without making any arrangements for security of Afghanistan and they will never come back because they are trying to rebuild the country but through humanitarian assistance programs etc. but we are in a total soup total darkness about how we can proceed in the face of Afghanistan we have no linkages but we are trying to build up as you know the centralation of public all the heads of state with Prime Minister Modi because they hold the key they are the nearest or the closest neighbors for us as well as for Afghanistan and they are sympathetic to having a united democratic liberal Afghanistan without the or even with the Taliban but a more civilized Taliban so we can find some common cause but on the other hand we have this formidable axis of China Russia Pakistan Taliban now with Pakistan our relationship is nothing to speak about we have said that we will not talk to you unless you give up terrorism and they say no we are not terrorists we are ourselves victims of terrorism Pakistan has just issued a policy policy for Pakistan it does not offer anything to India except a very plan declaration that we would like to improve relations with India and that they have been saying for years but as long as an army is in power and not democratic forces Pakistani policies will not change so there is no hope there and therefore in this process of rebuilding the post pandemic world it does not come about yet America is very very much back in that because Biden keeps declaring and then we have this crisis in Ukraine deliberately created by Putin perhaps to divert attention from America's domination or western domination so maybe he was prompted by the Chinese we don't know but he is showing a very strong position and he has declared an ultimatum that if you allow Ukraine and Georgia etc to be members of NATO there will be war so it's a virtual declaration of war but the Americans are not saying no no we will not take them but they also are not saying that we are not in a hurry to take them so there is a compromise point there if the Americans can say that we are not in a hurry to get these countries of course what Russia wants is a ironclad commitment that Ukraine and Georgia will not be allowed into NATO but some kind of a guarantee can be done given if not US will impose sanctions against Russia big way and that will hurt Europeans because Russia supplies gas 40% of gas from Europe comes from Russia so there is a impasse there is a serious situation there but my own prediction is that there will be no war because nobody wants to fight a war in the middle of the pandemic nobody has the strength or courage to do that so expect that some kind of a compromise will evolve but India has not rolled there because we are both friendly with both United States and Russia and we will not intervene you must have seen the Indian statement that the United Nations Security Council simply urging peace and prosperity rather than war so if you ask me where does India stand I can say that we are still trying to build a multi-polar world we don't want to buy polar world but ended now we have a unique polar world but we also would like that to move into a multi-polar world and who are these multi-polars United States of course Russia of course European Union of course and then China aspiring India aspiring Japan aspiring so these kind of six countries are projected as not that everybody else has accepted your leadership but we have ourselves declared that we are leaders but who will follow us these five leaders are lined up and who will follow India will follow our country and that is uncertain so we are in a position as I wrote in the Hindu a few days ago we are now from non-aligned we went to kind of selective alignment now we are into universal alignment we are willing to be aligned with anybody to find a place for India which is independent of China independent of the United States independent of other big parts and that is our objective and how soon that objective will be realized we do not and we are working very hard on it as you can see we are talking to everybody who is willing to hear us not only to friends but also force we sent to the ACO meeting land by China to solve the Afghan problem so at one time I used to think that why should we get to every group and we are in large number of groups but we are not in major important groups like APEC they have not taken us as yet but we are not a permanent member of the security council so these things are not at working and speaking of the security council permanent membership of course there is no possibility because there is no formula which will get the support of two thirds majority of the department members and so I do not expect that from the security council we are on the security council for one month here and we are doing our best to justify our claim for a permanent membership also in which we are done very well thanks to Thirumurti from Tamil Nadu who is our ambassador in the UA so this is general picture I have tried to do it within one hour to tell you the story of the last 75 years of this foreign policy thank you very much