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NEW DELHI, Jan 23: External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Monday praised the then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's handling of the diplomatic situation following the nuclear tests in 1998 and said that within a space of two years India had engaged all the major countries of the world. Presiding over the third Atal Bihari Vajpayee memorial lecture that was delivered by former Singaporean diplomat Bilahari Kausikan in New Delhi, S Jaishankar also praised Vajpayee's stint as an external affairs minister, and his role in strengthening India's ties with the US and Russia. The external affairs minister said the fundamentals of mutual respect, mutual sensitivity and mutual interest that are talked about now in terms of the modus vivendi with China, a lot of it is credited to Vajpayee. Asserting that Vajpayee was never "impervious" to the challenges of terrorism, S Jaishankar praised his realism in using all instruments at his command to actually try to forge a basis of relationships in this region which would very explicitly abjure terrorism. Talking about the 1998 Pokhran nuclear tests, the external affairs minister urged people not to look just at the tests but also look at the diplomacy that followed them. "Within a space of two years after the tests, we had engaged all the major countries of the world, had actually brought them around. When you had the visit of a president (Bill) Clinton, PM (John) Howard, PM (Yoshiro) Mori, visit of president (Jacques) Chirac. It was actually the post-test diplomacy, which I think anybody who is in the field of diplomacy, should look at and seek to draw lessons," he said.
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