Defence Ministers’ Conclave is being held on the sidelines of Aero India 2023 in Bengaluru on Tuesday. Defence Rajnath Singh hosted the Defense and Deputy Defence Ministers of 27 countries at the Conclave.
While addressing the Defence Ministers’ Conclave, Singh stressed India stands for rules-based international order, in which ‘might being right’ is replaced by fairness, cooperation and equality.
The Raksha Mantri’s statement seemed to be aimed at China which is entangled in a bitter border dispute at friction points in eastern Ladakh since May 2020.
China reaffirmed India’s stand for a rules-based international order, in which “the primordial instinct of the might being right is replaced by the civilisational concept of fairness, cooperation, respect and equality amongst all sovereign nations”.
The Raksha Mantri said that from ancient times, India has always believed that humanity is one family.
“India has always been open to new ideas from across the world, Commingling and contest of various thoughts has made us a global ideation centre. Our ancient ethos guides us to work not only towards cooperation for mutual benefit, but goes a welcome step further from a mere transactional approach to an edifying recognition of all humanity as one family,” Singh said.
Singh emphasised that terrorism, illegal arms trade, drugs smuggling, human trafficking pose significant security threats to the world and stressed the need to devise new strategies to counter these threats.
“India does not believe in dealing with such security issues in the old paternalistic or the neo-colonial paradigms. We consider all nations as equal partners. That is why, we do not believe in imposing external or supra national solutions to a country’s internal problems. We do not believe in giving sermons or cut-and-dried solutions, which do not respect the national values and constraints of the countries in need of assistance. Rather, we support the capacity building of our partner countries, so that they may chart out their own destiny, in accordance with their own genius,” he said.
