“India has never been for de-dollarization … the US is our largest trade partner and we have no interest in weakening the US dollar at all,” said Dr S Jaishankar, speaking at the 22nd edition of the Doha Forum in Qatar’s capital.
As for Donald Trump’s remarks about the BRICS seeking to dump the dollar and push a new currency, he clarified that “Right now there is no proposal to have a BRICS currency, BRICS do discuss financial transactions.”
He was positive about the previous Trump administration, noting that it was in 2017 when then President Trump gave the Quad its second life and made new commitments to the Indo-Pacific.
“We had a strong and solid relationship with the first Trump administration,” he recalled, “Yes there were some issues mostly trade related but there were a whole lot of issues on which President Trump was actually forward leaning.”
“I would say from our perspective there is a certain personal relationship between Prime Minister Modi and President Trump. In terms of politics, we really don’t have divisive issues.”
He referred to the instability in West Asia as affecting India’s trade and shipping costs.
“We still have about half a million Indians who live in the Mediterranean countries. We have trade of about $80 billion with that region. There is a larger regional instability which is growing month on month. As a country on that side of Asia we are feeling the impact of this,” Jaishankar said.
“We’re feeling it in shipping costs, we are feeling trade disruptions. We could see it in radicalisation. Today instability anywhere actually is a cause for concern. There’s no region you can say which is far away and it doesn’t matter to me any more.”
He was optimistic about the situation in Ukraine moving in the direction towards negotiation.
“In the last few weeks and months, I’ve seen this sentiment expressed by major European leaders who are actually telling us to please keep engaging Russia and engaging Ukraine. We welcome that.”
