Congress MP Shashi Tharoor.
Credit: PTI file photo
New Delhi: Adding more strain to his relationship with his party, senior MP Shashi Tharoor on Wednesday appeared to suggest that Congress governments did not conduct surgical strikes like Modi government did by claiming that the country breached the LoC for the first time in 2016, only to be contradicted by party leaders with one dubbing him a “super spokesperson of the BJP” who should be made “foreign minister”.
The leaders also recalled statements of former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, who was then Foreign Secretary, to rebut the Thiruvananthapuram MP’s remarks made in Panama where he is leading a multi-party delegation, even as the latter received support from Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju who said, “we Indians must speak in one voice in crucial time at least.”
Tharoor said, “when, for the first time, India breached the Line of Control between India and Pakistan to conduct a surgical strike on a terror base, a launch pad - the Uri strike in September 2015. That was already something we had not done before. Even during the Kargil War, we had not crossed the Line of Control.”
“In Uri, we did and then came the attack in Pulwama in January 2019. This time, we crossed not only the LoC but also the international border, and we struck the terrorist headquarters in Balakot. This time, we have gone beyond both of those…We have struck at the Punjabi heartland of Pakistan by hitting terror bases, training centres, and terror headquarters in nine places,” he said.
Tagging Tharoor’s remarks, senior leader Udit Raj said, “my dear Shashi Tharoor, Alas! I could prevail upon PM Modi to declare you as super spokesperson of BJP , even declaring (you) as foreign minister before landing in India. How could you denigrate the golden history of Congress by saying that before PM Modi, India never crossed LoC and International border.”
Referring to the 1965 war when the Army entered Pakistan and surprised the Pakistanis in the Lahore sector, tearing Pakistan in “two pieces” in 1971 war and the “several” surgical strikes conducted during UPA, he asked, “How could you be so dishonest to the party which gave you so much?” He claimed UPA “unleashed” surgical strikes “but drum beating was not done to encash (it) politically”.
Congress Media and Publicity Department chairperson Pawan Khera retweeted Raj besides posting Singh’s and Jaishankar’s comments separately with a cryptic post “CC @ShashiTharoor”. In the first post, Khera shared a video report on Singh’s interview in which he said "many surgical strikes were conducted under UPA.
Quoting from a Parliamentary Committee report, Khera said Jaishankar as Foreign Secretary in 2016 had told the panel that “professionally done, target-specific, limited-calibre counter-terrorist operations have been carried out across the LoC in the past too, but this is for the first time that the government has made it public”.
This is not the first time that Raj had targeted Tharoor. When Tharoor remarked that "no country has 100% foolproof intelligence" remarks, Raj said he was wondering that being a Congressman, how did the Thiruvananthapuram MP become the BJP's lawyer and was giving the ruling party a "clean chit" on the Pahalgam terror attack.
Tharoor had shot back, saying the latter is a former BJP MP and "is better qualified to understand who speaks for the BJP".