S Jaishankar On 1st Meeting With PM, China, BBC Series: Top Quotes

The timing of the BBC documentary is not accidental, it is politics by another means.

What is happening is, just like I told you -- this drip, drip, drip -- how do you shape a very extremist image of India, of the government, of the BJP, of the Prime Minister. I mean, this has been going on for a decade.

I am not a conspiracy theorist. Why difficult to understand there are ideologies and political forces outside India similar to those in India and the two working hand in glove.

The narrative that the Indian government is on the defensive, being accommodative. Who sent Indian Army to LAC? Rahul Gandhi didn't send them. Narendra Modi sent them.

If he (Rahul Gandhi) has superior knowledge and wisdom on China, I am always willing to listen. As I said, for me life is a learning process. If that is a possibility, I have never closed my mind to anything however improbable that may be

PM Modi had asked me to join the Cabinet. I had met him first in 2011 in China. He had come there on a visit as Gujarat Chief Minister. He made a very big impression on me. By 2011, I had seen many Chief Ministers come and go but I had not seen anyone come more prepared than him.

I gave it a lot of thought. I became a minister at the end of May. I roughly thought about a month before joining the BJP. I joined because my sense is that they are the right party at right time for India's rise and progress.

My father was a bureaucrat who had become a secretary but he was removed from his secretaryship. In 1980, when Indira Gandhi was re-elected he was the first secretary she removed. He saw his career in bureaucracy stalled. He was superseded in the Rajiv Gandhi period.

Pakistan's future is largely determined by its own actions and choices. Nobody reaches a difficult situation suddenly without cause. It is for them to find out. Today, our relationship is not one where we can be relevant directly to that process.

We had a tough time during Covid. Look at the coverage of our Covid. Did people not die in other countries? Did we see that coverage? Did you see that kind of pics from other countries?