ADVERTISEMENTs

Tharoor calls out Trump for ‘disappointing’ India-Pakistan remarks

The Congress leader argued that observations of Trump appear to “re-hyphenate” India and Pakistan in the global imagination.

Indian MP Shashi Tharoor. / Facebook/Shashi Tharoor

Senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor has objected to US President Donald Trump's claim of having brokered the ceasefire between India and Pakistan, calling the latter’s remarks "disappointing." In a post on his X handle, the MP from Thiruvananthapuram said Trump’s remarks were disappointing for India in four important ways. 

"First," he said, "it implies a false equivalence between the victim and the perpetrator and overlooks the US' past stance against Pakistan's well-documented support for cross-border terrorism." Tharoor, who was a career official at the United Nations from 1978 to 2007, argued that Trump’s statement also offered Pakistan a negotiating framework which it did not deserve. “India will never negotiate with a terrorist gun pointed at its head,” he said. 

The MP, who has been full of praise for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s handling of the situation in the wake of Pahalgam terror strike, said President Trump’s stand would help internationalize the Kashmir dispute, an obvious objective of the terrorists. However, India has consistently rejected the idea of a dispute on Kashmir and sees the problem as its internal affair.

“India has never requested, not is likely to seek, any foreign country’s mediation over its problems with Pakistan,” he said. 

Tharoor went on to argue that observations of President Trump appear to “re-hyphenate” India and Pakistan in the global imagination which was strange considering that for decades now world leaders have avoided clubbing their visits to India with visits to Pakistan. He called Trump’s statement “a major backward step.”



Comments

Related

//