Union Minister of External Affairs S Jaishankar on Thursday said the five years of the government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has kept alive and even strengthened the expectation of change in India, ANI reported. He said this was one of the biggest takeaways from the results of the Lok Sabha elections.

“A large majority of people in India recognised that India’s stature in the world has risen in the last five years,” Jaishankar said while addressing a seminar in Delhi.

The former diplomat said one of the changes occurring in the world was that globalisation is under stress. “Many of the assumptions of the globalisation, global supply chains, mobility of talent, market access, all those are no longer assumptions we can make to the same degree, with same confidence,” he said, according to ANI.

Another change was the growth of nationalism across the world. “The reasons are very different, every society is different,” he said. “That nationalism has been validated electorally in many places.”

Jaishankar said third change was the “global rebalancing” and the “sharpest manifestation” of that was in the rise of China and to an extent, the rise of India, according to PTI. “The global balancing in a sense is driving nationalism, the nationalism is driving the stress on globalisation,” he said.

On the electoral verdict that gave Modi a second term as prime minister, Jaishankar said the programmes at “bringing change and giving hope” to people at the lowest levels of income in the society has had a big impact.

Jaishankar said India’s foreign policy is integral to national security. “If we want to propel economic growth, then there is greater responsibility for Indian foreign policy to focus on external aspect of it,” he said.

He said Ministry of External Affairs has a big responsibility towards project execution which has strategic significance.