'Multiple Chickens Are Coming Home To Roost': Jaishankar's Veiled Dig At Pakistan's Economic Situation

Taking a veiled dig at Pakistan, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said that the the economic problems in the cash-strapped western neighbour of India are a result of multiple factors including excessive expenditure on military.

Without explicitly naming Pakistan, Jaishankar said, "The unnamed country to our west which we are talking about, there problems are much more long-term, they are deeper historically in terms of what happens when distortions have been introduced into the natural progress of an economy".

Jaishankar was speaking at a discussion organised by US think tank Hudson Institute in Washington.

"If you have excessive expenditure on the military or if your borrowing has not been prudent or if you have infrastructure which doesn't pay its way. I think there are lot of factors there. Multiple chickens are coming home to roost," he said in response to a question during a discussion at Hudson Institute.

He also pointed out that multiple countries in the world are facing different crises at present and that India's neighbouring country Sri Lanka also went through the same last year.

"Today, there are countries in different parts of the world in crises of different kinds and we have a few proximate to us. We saw Sri Lanka, which really went through almost an economic meltdown last year and we had to step forward. They were engaged in a negotiation with the fund [IMF] and their needs were so immediate and so serious that we actually did the largest bilateral lending we've ever done. we gave them a package of almost $4 billion as a way of stabilising their economy," he said.