‘Should get over West is bad guy syndrome’, says India’s Jaishankar in indirect swipe at China

Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said that there is a need to shed the “West is the bad guy” syndrome, as he said that they are not flooding goods on a massive scale in Asia and Africa, in an indirect reference to China.

In an interview to Indian news channel Asianet on Sunday (Sept 17), Jaishankar further said that his remarks should not be seen as a defence of the Western countries.

He was in Thiruvananthapuram as part of the launch of thePM Vishwakarma scheme.

"It is not the West which is flooding Asia and Africa with goods on a massive scale. I think we need to get over the syndrome of the past that the West is the bad guy and on the other side are the developing countries. The world is more complicated, the problems are much more complicated than that," the minister said in response to a question by former Indian diplomat TP Sreenivasan, who interviewed Jaishankar for the channel.

China'strade and economic policies

He said the issue today was the building up of a strong sense, over the last 15-20 years, over the inequities of globalisation where countries saw their products, manufacturing and employment come under stress due to their markets being flooded by cheap goods — an indirect reference to the Chinese trade and economic policies.

The minister said this underlying resentment and pain of those countries regarding the global economy was building up for the last 15-20 years and the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine conflict resulted in prices of energy and food items going up.

“So, there was a sense of anger building up in countries about them being used as an extractive resource to fuel the economy of another nation and added that the West was not to be blamed for that,” he added.

Not defending West

He, however, quickly pointed out that he was not defending the West and said that the way manufacturing is being leveraged and subsidised, it is affecting the manufacturing of many nations’ economies.

However, India's manufacturing, agriculture, scientific achievements like the Chandrayaan-3 mission, ability to vaccinate, etc,all of that has created a sense among the Global South, which includes the African Union, "that one of us has the ability to stand, grow and progress".

"So, they identify with us in a way that they do not with other people," Jaishankar said.

Commenting on why Chinese President Xi Jinping skipped the G20 summit in New Delhi, Jaishankar said the reasons were up for speculation.

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