India has every right to defend against ‘bad neighbours’: Jaishankar

Says neighbourhood policy guided hy common sense and mutual goodwill

- SIMONTINI BHATTACHARJEE

External Affairs Minister $ Jaishankar on Friday said India has every right to defend its people when it comes to “bad neighbours” and asserted that a neighbouring country cannot ask New Delhi to share water if it continues to spread terrorism in the country.

At the same time, he said with “good neighbours”, India invests, helps and shares, whether it was vaccines during COVID-19 pandemic, fuel and food support during the Ukraine conflict, or the USD 4 billion assistance to Sri Lanka during its financial crisis.

Without naming Pakistan, Jaishankar said India has every right to defend its people when it comes to “bad neighbours” and nobody can tell the country how to exercise that right “...people make it sound as diplomacy is rocket science. It is common sense.. now, what do you do in common sense with a neighbour? If you have a neighbour who is good to you or at least who is not harmful to you, your natural instinct is to be kind, is to help that neighbour. If the neighbour has a problem, you would like to contribute in some way. If nothing else, you will say hello...you will try to build friendships, bonding, etc. And that’s what we do as a country,” he said in a fireside chat at IIT Madras here.

“So, when you look around our neighbourhood, wherever actually there is a sense of good neighbourliness, I think you have seen India invests, India helps, India shares. Now, when you have bad neighbours, and if a country decides that they will deliberately, persistently, unrepentantly continue with terrorism, we have a right to defend our people against terrorism. We will exercise that right. How we exercise that right is up to us.

"You know, nobody can tell us what we should do or not. We will do whatever we have to do to defend ourselves.

That's a common sense proposition," he said.