India’s ties with Sri Lanka, Bangladesh will be positive: Jaishankar

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar has exuded confidence that India’s relationship with both Sri Lanka and Bangladesh will remain “positive and constructive”.

“It's not like India is seeking to control every political move of every neighbour. That's not how it works. It doesn't work, not just for us, it doesn't work for anybody else,” Jaishankar said on Tuesday (September 24) while speaking at an event titled ‘India, Asia and the World’ hosted by the Asia Society and the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York.

Bangladesh, Sri Lanka

Jaishankar was told that India had given unconditional aid to Bangladesh and Sri Lanka but government changes there seemed to be potentially adverse for New Delhi.

The minister said every country would have its own dynamics, and in foreign policy one must “read, anticipate, and then respond to it”.

“I'm very confident at the end of it all, in our neighbourhood, the realities of interdependence or mutual benefit and our ability to get along will serve both our interests. Those realities will assert themselves. That's been the history,” he said.

'Correctives take place'

Without taking the name of the Maldivian government which has since shed some of its strident anti-India postures, Jaishankar said referring to South Asia: “You then see the correctives beginning to manifest themselves."

“So, I would take it in that spirit and am quite confident that in both these cases, our relationship would continue to be positive and constructive,” he said, referring now to Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

The minister's remarks follow the change of government in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

Helping Sri Lanka

On Sri Lanka, Jaishankar said India stepped forward when Colombo was facing a very deep economic crisis, and “very frankly, when nobody else came forward". The Indian aid stabilised the Sri Lankan economy.

“At that time we did it, it was not like we had a political conditionality which accompanied that. We were doing it as a good neighbour who did not want to see that kind of economic meltdown at our doorstep.”

Jaishankar said that what happens politically in Sri Lanka, “is for their politics to work out".

‘Different dynamics are fine’

"At the end of the day, each of our neighbours will have their own particular dynamics. It's not our intention to suggest that their dynamics must necessarily adhere to what we might consider as being better for us. I think this is the real world. Everybody makes their choices and then countries adjust to each other and find ways of working it out,” he said.

On Bangladesh, he said: “It's a little bit different. What we have done over the last decade is to do projects of various kinds which have been good for both of us."

Silver lining 

“Economic activity overall has picked up, and logistics of that region has improved," the foreign minister said, adding that both countries have gained a lot out of that.

In August, Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus was sworn in as head of Bangladesh's interim government after weeks-long violent protests that led to the ouster of former prime minister Sheikh Hasina.

Marxist leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake was on Monday sworn in as Sri Lanka's ninth president.