India's international branding up due to initiation of new dialogues: EAM

Emphasising that initiating a new set of dialogues democratised foreign policy, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said that the dialogues fulfilled many objectives and the bonus of all of this is that India's international branding has also gone up.

"We are today seen as a country which has serious events, where a different set of people come and talk and I think that helped us enormously in terms of our international reputations," said Jaishankar on Tuesday during a virtual discussion at the Global Technology Summit. Carnegie India co-hosts the summit with the Ministry of External Affairs.

Referring to the new set of dialogues that were started by him years back when he served as Foreign Secretary, Jaishankar said: "One of the objectives of initiating a set of new dialogues was to sort of to democratises foreign policy."

"I did it at a time when there was also a sense in the country itself that many of the changes we saw in 2014 and 2019 were reflective of a larger conversation, broadening out of political conversations and I certainly feel that should be the case with foreign policy," he added.

The Minister also emphasised that foreign policy is a much more complicated business. "Certainly, when I started it involved many more issues and specialisation," he added.

Underlining that enough attention was not paid towards the technology, he said: "We viewed technology in a limited way. Either promotional way or overcoming denial issue."

"By doing particularly the technology summit we were reaching to the people who were not the traditional foreign policy people," the Minister said.

"People who knew a lot, whose inputs we will benefit from," he added.

Jasihankar emphasised that "we have succeeded in many ways in each of these objectives and by the way, the bonus of all of this is our international branding has also gone up.