Asked whether Beijing’s actions constituted economic coercion,India’s Foreign Affairs Minister,Subrahmanyam Jaishankar,said:“You know that bit – if it looks like a duck and it walks like a duck …”
Dr Jaishankar was in Melbourne for a meeting of the foreign affairs ministers of the Quad countries – the Indo-Pacific democracies of Australia,India,Japan and the United States.
At the same time,Australian Trade Minister Dan Tehan was in Delhi negotiating a free trade agreement with his Indian counterpart.
Dr Jaishankar said the outcome should be “a much larger quantum of trade and investment between Australia and India”. The pandemic had exposed an overconcentration on particular markets,he said,and the new agreement should help ease such problems.
“A lot of the progress and prosperity of the last 70 to 80 years is because of the fact that trade has been governed by rules and not politically influenced or driven or determined,” Dr Jaishankar toldThe Sydney Morning Herald andThe Age in an interview.
“We were all very clear” in the Quad ministers’ meeting,he said,that “we all believe politics should not be conducted by coercion at any time.”
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken last week said that China’s economic coercion of Australia had backfired. “I think China has lost more than Australia has in its efforts to squeeze Australia economically,” he said. Beijing would be “thinking twice about this in the future”.