India-US relationship can define 21st century, says Congressman Ro Khanna

INTERNATIONAL DESK: The relationship between India and the United States can define the 21st century, Indian-American Congressman Ro Khanna said on Monday, as a leading American daily in a long-form article articulated that the post-Ukrainian war world would see India’s emergence.

“The US-India relationship can define the 21st century,” Khanna said in a tweet, referring to The New York Times article.

Khanna said the prominent American daily “writes beautifully” about India’s rising confidence and paradoxes. The article ends on a hopeful note that pluralism, etched by Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, are an indelible part of its palimpsest, the Congressman said.

The daily quotes External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar as saying that a “world order which is still very, very deeply Western,” is being hurried out of existence by the impact of the war in Ukraine, to be replaced by a world of “multi-alignment” where countries will choose their own “particular policies and preferences and interests”.

After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, India has rejected American and European pressure at the United Nations to condemn the Russian invasion, turned Moscow into its largest oil supplier and dismissed the perceived hypocrisy of the West, the daily wrote. “Far from apologetic, its tone has been unabashed and its self-interest broadly naked,” the daily reported.

“I would still like to see a more rules-based world,” Jaishankar told The New York Times. “But when people start pressing you in the name of a rules-based order to give up, to compromise on what are very deep interests, at that stage I’m afraid it’s important to contest that and, if necessary, to call it out,” he said. (PTI)