Multilateral forums need reforms, says Jaishankar

Multilateralism will exist alongside national interests, external affairs minister S Jaishankar said on Thursday, pointing to India's experience with the fallout of the decision to take the Kashmir dispute to the United Nations (UN) soon after the country's independence.

- Rezaul H Laskar

Jaishankar made the remarks while participating in a session at the Raisina Dialogue, India's flagship conference on geopolitics and geo-economics, that focused the divide between the West and the Global South and the need to reform multilateral bodies such as the UN. He emphasised the need to revamp global bodies, saying they had been unable to find multilateral solutions to all the big issues in recent years.

Responding to a question on whether countries could compromise on values but not on interests, Jaishankar said this wasn't something new. "Look at our own example. Very literally in our first year of Independence, we put our trust in multilateralism and took the Kashmir aggression issue to the UN and others made it into an accession issue and they did it for geopolitical reasons," he said.