When Piketty came to India
Thomas Piketty, the French economist and author of the famous book Capital in the Twenty First Century, was recently in India. He delivered a lecture on the state of inequality globally as well as in India.
Indian Ambassador to China Vikram Misri has said that the tendency to sweep the situation at the Sino-Indian border under the carpet and characterise it as just a minor issue and a matter of perspective was inadvisable.
Such a tendency could only take the two countries further away from a sustained solution to present difficulties and deeper into an unfulfilling stalemate. It would tantamount to running away from the problem and in a direction opposite to that where the promise of a closer development partnership lay, Misra said at an online event between the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA) and the Chinese People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs (CPIFA) which was also addressed by Chinese Ambassador to India Sun Weidong, among others.
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“Maintenance of peace and tranquility in border areas is an essential basis for the development of the bilateral relationship. There is a need for respecting each others’ concerns and sensitivities,” he said.
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Misri said both India and China agree that they should stick to the consensus between the top leaders of the two countries. However, he pointed out that equally significant consensus has been reached between the two leaders in the past as well, on the importance of maintaining peace and tranquility, and it was important to stick to that consensus as well.
He said the impact on public opinion in India has been particularly strong due to the violation of peace and tranquility at the LAC. In a multipolar world, no country could set the agenda by itself without prior agreement and consultation, and then expect everyone else to come on board. No single country could expect a discussion to focus only on issues of its own interest while ignoring those raised or reflected by others. And no country should imagine that it has sole control over the narrative about a relationship or its actual course, he said.
“The sooner this is understood, the sooner we can move towards a real and reformed multilateralism,” he added.
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