E-Paper
India’s main opponent is China, not Pakistan, says Sharad Pawar
Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief and former defence minister Sharad Pawar in an interview published by Shiv Sena mouthpiece Saamna on Sunday said that India’s
Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief and former defence minister Sharad Pawar in an interview published by Shiv Sena mouthpiece Saamna on Sunday said that India’s main opponent is China and not Pakistan, but New Delhi cannot afford a direct war with Beijing.
He said that India must resolve all issues with China through dialogue and diplomatic strategies with the help of other nations and the United Nations (UN).
Pawar, in the second part of the three-part interview to Sena parliamentarian and Saamana’s executive editor Sanjay Raut also said that the Modi government tried to take a “different stand” on foreign policy but it did not work.
“We never changed our foreign policies and bilateral relations with other countries and they were in continuation since Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and even Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s regimes. Prime Minister Narendra Modi tried to take a different stand by calling Chinese President Xi Jinping on friendly visits and made him sit on a swing [at Sabarmati riverfront]. Modi tried to portray that he has forged ties of friendship with our neighbours. But these efforts have not worked,” the former Union minister said.
Pawar said that China successfully wooed all the neighbouring countries, including Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka against India.
“Modi’s first visit after taking over charge as the prime minister was to Nepal, which was considered India’s friend and the sole Hindu nation, but the neighbour now stands with China. Pakistan had already shifted its loyalty. India played a major role in the liberation of Bangladesh, but the latter recently inked an agreement with China. Same is the case with Sri Lanka. This means all the countries surrounding India have started talking against us. The disagreement in relationship with the neighbours is the latest contribution [of Modi government],” he said.
The NCP chief said that the issues with China cannot be resolved by war. “Our military strength is just one-tenth as compared to that of China’s and in such a backdrop we cannot afford to have a direct war with them. It is true that we have readied our forces and can have a war and are ready to pay the price if the need be. But instead of that we should try to solve the issues diplomatically through dialogue. We lost our territory to China more than 50 years ago and the dispute over it still persists. We should build pressure with the help of other countries and the UN to regain the territory,” he said.
Pawar said that though China’s first enemy, almost three decades back, was the United States and Japan, it has now started to pose a threat against India and this was its strategy all along.
“When I visited China as the defence minister in 1993 and met the then president of China, he had hinted at this. He had said that his country did not want to have any clashes with its neighbours, as their prime rivalry at the time was the US. He had said that China will “look” at the neighbouring countries after about 25 years,” said Pawar in the interview.
The veteran politician, while replying to a question on the country’s economic situation, said that the Modi government should consult with experts such as former PM Manmohan Singh to revive the Indian economy.
“As the finance minister in the Narsimha Rao government, of which I was a part too, Manmohan Singh gave new a direction to the economy which was reeling under the crisis in the early 1990s. There is a need to take such similar steps with the help of economic experts. The Modi government lacks in dialogue with those belonging to different ideologies even during such challenging times when there is a pandemic. When Singh, Pranab Mukherjee and P Chidambaram were finance ministers, they would constantly meet experts and political leaders across the party lines and get a sense of the issues faced by the country. It does not happen now,” he said.
When the former Maharashtra chief minister (CM) was asked what he thought about PM Modi calling him his ‘political guru’, Pawar said such statements are “convenient stands” taken by politicians and there was no concept of political gurus.
Pawar also has praised CM Uddhav Thackeray for his performance in the first six months of the government and said that “though the written exam is over and practicals are pending, he will pass the exam”.
