External affairs minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar is India’s man of the moment. Since the Russia-Ukraine war began, and India came under attack for not toeing the widely advocated “morally correct” line of boycotting the former, he has batted many a bouncer with aplomb, turning every single one of them into an opportunity to hit out forcefully at everyone who has raised eyebrows at India’s neutrality in the war. With his sharp replies, he has emerged as the perfect voice to pitch Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s views on the international stage. The general consensus among people is that the minister has succeeded in presenting before the world the image of a stronger India that rides on its growing self-confidence as a nation with a $3.1 trillion economy and massive market that global companies hope to crack. As an emerging Asian nation with a population of over 1.4 billion, India cannot be ignored or bullied into submission, a point that Jaishankar has repeatedly made in his retorts