- Saturday, May 18, 2024
Pakistan’s former information and broadcasting minister Fawad Chaudhry on May 1 posted a video on X that showed the Indian opposition leader criticising the Modi government and said he was ‘on fire’.
By: Shubham Ghosh
IN A bizarre turn of events, a leader of India’s opposition Indian National Congress has claimed that prime minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) put pressure on a former minister in the neighbouring Pakistan to praise his party’s leader Rahul Gandhi so that they could benefit from such it in the ongoing general elections.
A political slugfest started after former Pakistani information and broadcasting minister Fawad Chaudhry, who was a member of the government of former prime minister Imran Khan, praised Rahul Gandhi for criticising the Hindu nationalists over the consecration ceremony at the Ram temple in Ayodhya in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh in January.
In a video that Chaudhry, who has now quit Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, shared on social media on Wednesday (1), the Congress leader was seen speaking about the temple and asking whether any poor people were invited to the occasion.
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“Rahul on fire….”, the Pakistani leader’s tweet, which featured a video of the Indian leader speaking, captioned.
Rahul on fire …. https://t.co/6pi1mL0bQN
— Ch Fawad Hussain (@fawadchaudhry) May 1, 2024
In the video that the Pakistani leader shared, Gandhi was speaking about Ayodhya’s Ram Mandir inauguration and asking whether there were any poor people invited to the occasion. Coming under fire for supporting Rahul Gandhi, the Pakistani leader added: ‘Because I oppose extremists and hate mongers be it in Pak or India or elsewhere….”
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It did not take much time for either Modi or his BJP to launch an attack on the Congress who accused the Indian opposition party of having links with Pakistan. Speaking at an election rally in Anand in the western state of Gujarat, Modi on Thursday (2) said the “partnership between Congress and Pakistan” has been “exposed” as leaders in the neighbouring country were praying for Rahul Gandhi to become India’s PM.
He said Pakistan was disappointed that the Congress, which he accused of handing terror dossiers to that country, was losing ground in India.
Amit Malviya, the chief of the BJP’s information technology cell, and Shehzad Poonawalla, its national spokesperson, also accused the opposition party of harbouring Pakistan connections.
However, Alvi counter attacked the BJP saying Chaudhry was pressured by former Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif and the government of his brother, PM Shehbaz Sharif, to make such a statement praising Rahul Gandhi so that the Indian leadership could exploit it electorally.
“…The statement by Fawad Chaudhry is done under pressure by Nawaz Sharif and his brother’s government. PM Modi has very good relations with Nawaz Sharif. This statement has come so that our Prime Minister can exploit it. BJP has relations (with Pakistan). Manmohan Singh, Rahul Gandhi, or Sonia Gandhi never went to Pakistan…The people who want to take benefit from his (Fawad Chaudhry) statement have pressurized him…” he told news agency Asian News International.
Modi had invited Nawaz Sharif, the then Pakistani prime minister, to his first oath-taking ceremony in New Delhi in 2014. Next year, he had also made a surprise visit to the Sharif’s house in Lahore while returning home from Afghanistan. However, the efforts to normalise relations between the two nations stopped soon, thanks to a series of terror attacks on the Indian soil and India’s decision to abrogate Article 370 of the Indian Constitution that gave a special status to the former state of Jammu and Kashmir, which is also claimed by Pakistan.
