Chandigarh, Dec. 29: Congress Rajya Sabha MP Partap Singh Bajwa on Wednesday accused Union external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj for blocking him on Twitter. He claimed that the minister was avoiding him for asking “tough” questions on 39 Indians missing in Iraq.
“Is this the way to run external affairs ministry? Does it behove the office of Sushma Swaraj Ji to block a Member of Parliament for asking tough questions on 39 missing Indians in Iraq?”, Bajwa tweeted on Wednesday sharing the screenshot of him being blocked by Sushma on Twitter.
“I am not following her on Twitter. As an MP, I tweet to her regarding problems faced by Indians, especially Punjabis, in other countries so that she can take it up with her counterparts. But if she can block an MP, what will be her attitude towards others,” Bajwa told an english daily.
A former Lok Sabha MP from Gurdaspur and Punjab Congress president, Bajwa discovered he had been blocked by Swaraj after he was unable to send his tweet on reports of Sikh community in Hangu district of Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province alleging that they were “being forced to convert to Islam” to her. The MP had tagged both Sushma and Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the tweet.
Bajwa had accused Swaraj of misleading the House on missing Indians in the July session and then again in August. The 39 Indians, mostly from Punjab’s Amritsar, Gurdaspur, Hoshiarpur, Kapurthala and Jalandhar districts, went missing in Iraq’s Mosul when it was overrun by the Islamic State. The central government continues to classify the 39 men as “missing”. He had said while Swaraj had been assuring the families that the government was making all efforts to trace the missing men, she had been changing the goalposts.
He had said while Swaraj claimed that the missing youths were in a jail in Iraq’s Badush town, but a news channel showed that the jail had been destroyed by the ISIS.
During the ongoing winter session, in a written reply in Lok Sabha, Swaraj has stated that India has completed the DNA testing of the families of 39 Indians missing from Iraq’s Mosul city since 2014 and forwarded the samples to Iraqi authorities for matching with the mortal remains in the graves there. The process was initiated after Iraqi authorities informed India about the mass graves found in and around Mosul and Badush areas following the liberation of that region from the control of the ISIS.
HT’s efforts to contact the foreign minister did not elicit any response.
News Source: http://www.hindustantimes.com
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