Jaishankar restates Modi's Moscow message after unveiling Gandhi bust in Tokyo

India's External Affairs Minister Dr S. Jaishankar after unveiling the bust of Mahatma Gandhi in Tokyo on Sunday (Jul28) restated Prime Minister Narendra Modi's message to Moscow amid war in Ukraine.

"Gandhiji's message was that solutions do not come from a battlefield, that no era should be an era of war," Jaishankar said in Tokyo, repeating what Prime Minister Narendra Modi told Russia's President Vladimir Putin during SCO meeting in Uzbekistan's Samarkand.

"I know that today’s era is not the era for war," Prime Minister Narendra Modi told Putin in September 2022. "We have spoken to you many times on the phone before on this, that democracy, diplomacy and dialogue — these things help the world," he had said.

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Earlier, whileaddressing the 14th East Asia Summit's Foreign Ministers Meeting in the capital of the Lao People's Democratic Republic as part of the meetings of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Jaishankarmaintained the importance of dialogue and diplomacy.

"Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently engaged (with) President Vladimir Putin and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. India stands ready to contribute in any manner possible," he said earlier.

WION first reported that Prime Minister Modi will visit Ukraine next month for the first time since February 2022, when Putin launched Russia's unprecedented offensive on Ukraine after dubbing it as "special military operations".

"Without Mahatma Gandhi, our independence struggle would perhaps have taken much longer...independence of India actually decolonised the entire world, it was the starting point of a very momentous event," Jaishankar said in Japan.

"That when India became free, other parts of Asia became free, Africa became free, Latin America became free. So what Gandhiji started, today when we say India is the fifth largest economy in the world, where the world is changing, it is heading towards multipolarity, that when the G7 becomes the G20. In a way, all this was started as a result of what Gandhiji did in history," Jaishankar added.

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"I would say today, at a time when we are seeing so much conflict in the world, so much tension, so much polarisation, so much bloodshed, it's very important that Gandhiji's message was that solutions do not come from a battlefield, that no era should be an era of war. And that message applies today as much as it did 80 years ago."