External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar emphasized the importance of the India-China relationship in shaping the future of Asia and the world, as global changes stretch the fabric of the existing order. Speaking at the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York on Tuesday, Jaishankar stated that the current global landscape is becoming increasingly multipolar, and Asia is at the forefront of this transformation, with India playing a leading role.
“Asia is very much at the cutting edge of that change. Within Asia, India is part of leading that change. But that change is today stretching the fabric of the global order… I think the India-China relationship is key to the future of Asia. In a way, you can say if the world is to be multipolar, Asia has to be multipolar. And therefore, this relationship will influence not just the future of Asia but, in that way, perhaps the future of the world as well,” he remarked.
Jaishankar noted that India must prepare to rise amidst the volatility and unpredictability that characterize the current global environment. “India, which is rising, has to prepare to rise amidst volatility and unpredictability. Typically, when countries rise, when big powers rise, they hope for congenial circumstances,” he said.
He chose three words to describe the shifting global landscape. The first was “rebalancing,” highlighting Asia’s pivotal role in this process. “Now when I speak about rebalancing, I think Asia has been very much key to that rebalancing when we talk. If one looks, for example, at the last top 20 economies of the world, there are many more Asian economies in that than there were a few decades ago. And even if one looks among the 20, the Asian ones have really risen much more strongly and impactfully. And among them, is India, which was a decade ago the 10th largest economy in the world, currently the 5th, likely to be the third by the end of the decade,” he elaborated.
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The second term Jaishankar used was “multipolar,” describing it as the outcome of rebalancing, which is shifting international politics towards finding convergences and overlaps. He noted, “The word that would occur to me when I again tried to describe the world would be multipolar and this is a consequence of rebalancing in the sense that there are many more independent centres of decision-making in the world and what it does is it really shifts international politics more in the direction of finding convergences and overlaps, and that actually has an impact on the global architecture that from what was in the initial years of the UN, a very much more bipolar world briefly went into unipolarity.”
The third word he used was “plurilateralism,” acknowledging it as an awkward term but one that captures the complexity of a world evolving beyond simple bilateral relationships. “A third word that would occur to me is plurilateralism. It’s a very ugly word, but it in a sense describes a world beyond bilateral relations, but in short, a multilateral one where countries form combinations based on these convergences and overlaps that I’ve talked about,” he said.
In conclusion, Jaishankar reiterated, “I think this is the latest step in the growth of that platform now rebalancing multipolar plurilateralism.”
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