Rajya Sabha MP Rakesh Sinha registered his strong displeasure of US secretary of state Antony Blinken’s meddling in Indian affairs. He said while speaking to RepublicWorld, Blinken is bound by certain limitations and “crossing the line of limitation is neither desirable nor acceptable”.
Before meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other top Union Ministers of India, it has been revealed that visiting Blinken had discussed India’s internal matter in the civil society meeting that also included a representative of the Dalai Lama on Wednesday.
Interfaith relations, freedom of expression, and the Pegasus spyware issue were part of the discussion. Farmers protesting at Delhi’s borders over the agriculture reform laws passed last year were also part of the conversation.
The seven civil society representatives were Geshe Dorji Damdul, director of the Tibet House in New Delhi, lawyer Menaka Guruswamy, Inter-Faith Harmony Foundation of India, head Khwaja Iftikhar Ahmed, Swami Shantamandada of the Ramakrishna Mission, AK Merchant of Bahai Foundation, Anuvinda Varey of the Christian Coalition of Health, and a representative from a Sikh organisation.
Iftikhar Ahmed, as per a report, mentioned that he spoke on the need for interfaith relations to come to the centerstage while pointing out the challenges to the region due to developments in Afghanistan.
Another participant who declined to be identified further revealed that besides them, regional issues such as the security situation in Afghanistan and China’s aggression were also discussed in meeting.
Sinha asked “What if Indian representatives in the US go to blacks and talks to them about the custodial death, police coercion on ethical grounds an and other undesirable happenings of the country?”, he said while mentioning that when India does not interfere in internal matters of other it expects the same from the US, and all other countries.
Bharatiya Janata Party leader Subramanian Swamy also said it is “Gross interference in the internal affairs of India.”
Meanwhile, after meeting, while addressing a press conference, Blinken spoke of the “great challenges” for all democracies in the world, particularly India, and the U.S. Blinken also said the India-U.S. relationship was one of the “most important” in the world whose people were “connected by shared values”.
He then added that our democracies were a ‘work in progress’ and underlined that there are ‘challenges’ that can be ugly and need to be ‘dealt with openly’, thereby hinting at the internal issues that he allegedly discussed during the roundtable.
