Changes in foreign policy needed amid changing landscape: Jaishankar

New Delhi, Dec 15: External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Sunday said there must be “a foreign policy for Viksit Bharat” as he underlined that changes in foreign policy are needed amid a changing landscape.

In his address at the launch of ‘India’s World’ magazine here, he also said “when we speak about changing foreign policy, if there is talk of a post-Nehruvian construct, it should not be treated as a political attack”.

Foreign policy expert C Raja Mohan chairs the editorial board of the magazine.

The external affairs minister said there are “four big factors” which should cause people in India to actually ask themselves as to “what are the changes which are necessary in a foreign policy”.

“One, and I happened, by coincidence, to speak about it yesterday, for many, many years, we had what someone else very pithily summed up as the ‘Nehru development model’. That was book released yesterday by Dr Arvind Panagariya,” he said.

A ‘Nehru development model’, inevitably produced a ‘Nehru foreign policy’ and “we seek to correct that abroad”, just as efforts being made to “reform” the consequences of the model at home, Jaishankar said on Saturday, in his virtual address at the launch of the book ‘The Nehru Development Model’.

In his address at the Sunday’s event, he reiterated that a ‘Nehru development model’ produced a ‘Nehru foreign policy’.

“I mean, it was obvious. And, it wasn’t just what was happening in our country, there was an international landscape in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and the 1970s which was bipolar. Then there was a unipolar landscape. And, both those landscapes have also changed,” the EAM said.

On top of it, in the last two decades or so, there has been a “very intense globalisation”, a strong interdependence with countries. “In a way the relationship, the behaviour of states towards each other have changed,” he said.

Finally, if one looks at technology, technology on foreign policy, technology on state capability, “technology on our daily existence, that too has changed”, he added.