External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar has said that there is “a political effort” to depict the current government in India in a certain way and there is a difference between the political imagery that has been “concocted” and the actual governance record out there.
During a conversation with former US National Security Advisor General HR McMaster in Battlegrounds’ session on ‘India: Opportunities And Challenges For A Strategic Partnership’ presented by the Hoover Institution, Mr Jaishankar on Wednesday also said that India is going through a very stressful time” right now because of the pandemic.
“We are actually giving free food, last year for multiple months and right now again because of the second wave we have resumed, to as much as 800 million people. We put money into the bank accounts of 400 million people,” he said.
“This is what this government did. Now, if you are feeding more than two and a half times the population of the United States and you are funding more than the population of the US and you’re doing this pretty much anonymously and impersonally in the sense beyond the name and the detail, the bank account of the person. We’re not asking anything more. There is no criteria of discrimination,” Mr Jaishankar said.
“We Indians are extremely confident about our democracy India is a deeply pluralistic society,” the minister said.
Mr Jaishankar was responding to a question by Gen McMaster on some alleged “Hindutva” policies that could undermine the secular nature of Indian democracy, how he sees internal Indian politics evolving during the trauma of the pandemic and are India’s friends “right to be concerned about some of these recent trends.”
