The Congress on Monday said Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s address on India-Pakistan conflict “was completely upstaged by President Donald Trump’s revelations a few minutes earlier”.
Referring to the, Congress general secretary in-charge for communication Jairam Ramesh said “the PM was completely silent on them”.
“Has India agreed to US mediation? Has India agreed to a ‘neutral site’ for a dialogue with Pakistan? Will India now give in on US demands for opening Indian markets in autos, agriculture and other areas,” he asked.
“The months ahead will demand both painstaking diplomacy and a collective resolve. One-liners and dialogue-baazi are poor substitutes,” said Ramesh.
Congress’s publicity and media department chairman Pawan Khera said: “We heard the PM’s statement today… We also heard the US President’s statement, which was deeply disturbing, because the US president says he used trade as a threat to ensure that Operation Sindoor is stopped… We expected the PM to respond to this. Unfortunately, he did not.”
Senior Congress leader criticised the US President, saying his post is “disappointing for India in four important ways”. “First, it implies a false equivalence between the victim and the perpetrator, and seemingly overlooks the US’ own past unwavering stance against Pakistan’s well-documented links to cross-border terrorism.” In the second point, Tharoor said, “It offers Pakistan a negotiating framework which it certainly has not earned. India will never negotiate with a terrorist gun pointed at its head.”
“Third, it ‘internationalises’ the Kashmir dispute, an obvious objective of the terrorists. India rejects the idea of a dispute and sees the problem as an internal affair of India’s.” In his fourth point, Tharoor said it “re-hyphenates” India and Pakistan in the global imagination.
“For decades now, world leaders had been encouraged not to club their visits to India with visits to Pakistan, and starting with President Clinton in 2000, no US President had done so. This is a major backward step.”
