New Delhi: External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Sunday said that while discussing India’s maritime interest, talking about the Indian Ocean and not the Pacific Ocean shows a limitation of thinking and the country should go beyond this line of thought.
“Indo-Pacific is a new strategic concept going on in the world,” news agency PTI quoted him as saying.
Speaking at an event to unveil the Gujarati translation of his book, ‘The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World’, EAM Jaishankar said that the idea that India should not interfere with other countries is a “dogma” which should change.
“So far, we think about the Indian Ocean whenever we think about oceans. This is the limitation of our thinking that we talk about the Indian Ocean whenever we talk about maritime interest,” Jaishankar said.
“But more than 50 per cent of our trade goes towards the East, towards the Pacific Ocean. The line between the Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean is only on the map, exists on an atlas, but there is no such thing in reality…We should go beyond the historical lines in our thinking, because our interest has increased. Indo-Pacific is a new strategic concept going on in the world,” he added.
