NEW DELHI: The upcoming term of Donald Trump as the President of the U.S. is going to be an advantage for India, said External Affairs Minister Dr S Jaishankar while speaking at an Assocham conference on Thursday.
“India is in a much more advantageous position than many other countries to build deeper relations with the incoming Donald Trump 2.0 administration in the US. Some countries are looking at Trump 2.0 as a political challenge, we are not. That separates us from a very large number of countries, so we are in a much more advantageous position to translate 2.0 into a deeper relationship,” Dr Jaishankar said.
India has undergone a tremendous change in the last 10 years. The third term of the Narendra Modi Government has impressed most nations and political leaders across the globe.
Regarding relations with China, Dr Jaishankar said, with that China accounting for 32-33 per cent of global manufacturing, it is logical that several supply chains will have to go through China.
He said that India would not want to end up as a market for another economy and not being able to compete with their products which are dumped in our country.
''We have to find the right balance here. For the last four and a half years, our political relations have not been good but things have improved a little bit -we have managed to make some progress there. We have to sit down with the Chinese what we do further,” Jaisankar added.
Regarding Russia, the external affairs minister said that in the last two years people generally know that we have been importing more oil from Russia, what people do not know is that we have been importing other natural resources such as cooking coal, fertiliser,from Russia
He also spoke about the political situation in West Asia.
Dr Jaishankar particularly talked about the shipping challenges in the Red Sea and how the situation there is of direct consequences to India's economic interest.