New Delhi, February 21
“Actual politics” is being conducted “ostensibly as media” by people who do not have the “courage to come into the political field,” External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar told ANI, in an allusion to the BBC documentary on the Gujarat riots that accuses Prime Minister Narendra Modi of inaction.
The minister said barring China, India’s ties with other major powers were very good and felt both Russia and Ukraine knew that “if we can be of any use, we will be willing”. India was earlier involved in defusing the situation on the grain deal and the Zaporizhzhia power plant.
He said India would continue with the hands-off policy with respect to Pakistan despite its current economic difficulties. “Nobody reaches a difficult situation suddenly and without cause. It is for them to find a way out. Our relationship today is not one where we can be relevant directly to that process,” he said.
Expanding on the BBC documentary, the minister said, “Sometime politics of India doesn’t even originate in its borders… there is a phrase ‘war by other means’, this is politics by other means — you want to do a hatchet job and say this is just another quest for truth which we decided after 20 years to put at this time.”
Although the documentary came over a year before the Lok Sabha poll in 2024, he questioned the timing of its release. “I mean, come on, you think the timing is accidental! Let me tell you one thing — I don’t know if the election season has started in India, Delhi or not, but, for sure it has started in London, New York,” he said.
“What is happening is, just like I told you — this drip, drip, drip — how do you shape a very extremist image of India, of the government, of the BJP, of the Prime Minister. I mean, this has been going on for a decade,” he said of some western media’s bias against PM Modi.
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