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Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, India’s foreign minister, said on Friday that there “continues to be resistance” to a stronger role for the Global South in defining solutions to critical international concerns.
In his speech during the Foreign Ministers’ Session of the Voice of the Global South summit, hosted by New Delhi, Jaishankar emphasised the need “to take everyone along, and everyone’s views along” during multilateral and plurilateral discussions.
The minister went on to emphasise “self-reliance” as a means of mitigating the Global South’s economic “vulnerabilities.” “The Covid era is a stark reminder of the perils of dependence for basic necessities on far-away geographies,” he wrote. At the same time, the Global South, according to Jaishankar, must construct “resilient and reliable supply chains” and promote locally generated solutions.
He expressed similar sentiments when he addressed the UN General Assembly in September.
“At a time when East-West polarization is so sharp and North-South divide so deep, the New Delhi Summit also affirms that diplomacy and dialogue are the only effective solutions. The international order is diverse and we must cater for divergences, if not differences. The days when a few nations set the agenda and expected others to fall in line are over,” he said.
On Friday, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked leaders from the Global South to come together to address developing concerns, notably those in the Middle East. He reaffirmed India’s criticism of the Hamas attack on Israel, as well as the deaths of civilians in Gaza, and stated that New Delhi has always “emphasised the need for dialogue and diplomacy.”
Also on Friday, India’s largest opposition party, Congress, chastised “influential countries” for their silence on suspected human-rights violations in Gaza. These countries “choose to speak the language of human rights and justice when it is convenient,” but apply “double standards” when it comes to Ukraine and Palestine, according to the party’s general secretary, Jairam Ramesh.
