External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar said the West was not the “bad guy” as it was not flooding Asian and African markets with goods on a massive scale and that there was a need to get over the “syndrome” of seeing it in a negative way.
Jaishankar, in an interview with Malayalam news channel Asianet, also made it clear that he was not batting for the West. He was in Thiruvananthapuram as part of the launch of the PM Vishwakarma scheme.
“It is not the West which is flooding Asia and Africa with goods on a massive scale. I think we need to get over the syndrome of the past that the West is the bad guy and on the other side are the developing countries. The world is more complicated, the problems are much more complicated than that,” the minister said.
On being asked whether Chinese President Xi Jinping did not attend the G20 summit in New Delhi because it did not want India to be seen as the leader of the Global South, Jaishankar said the reasons were up for speculation.
He said the issue today was the building up of a strong sense, over the last 15-20 years, over the inequities of globalization where countries saw their products, manufacturing, and employment come under stress due to their markets being flooded by cheap goods — an indirect reference to the Chinese trade and economic policies.
