Washington: Criticising Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s foreign policy, Congress leader Manish Tewari has said his 14 months of diplomacy, including meetings with US President Barack Obama, has yielded “zero” results for India.
“Prime Minister of India has travelled abroad 29 times in last 14 months (sic), essentially about twice a month. He has got eight more visits, planned in the next three calendar months. The fact is that expect for the spectacularisation of diplomacy, there has been no substantive takeaway from any foreign visit at all,” Tewari, a former Union Minister of Information and Broadcasting, told PTI.
Tiwari, who is currently in the US, yesterday addressed a conference on ‘Democracy Rebooted – The Future of Technology in Elections’ by the Atlantic Council, a top American think tank.
“Prime Minister Modi has met President (Barack) Obama five times. There he has not walked away with a single big take away from any of those meetings. After the Indo-US civil nuclear deal, there is not a single big idea as to how to move the relationship to the next level. In fact there is no fresh idea in the relationship at all,” Tewari said on the status of the Indo-US relationship since May 2014.
“This is despite the fact that India has almost ended up subscribing to the US’ vision of Asian security. They (Modi Government) has not been able to get anything substantive out of the United States,” the Congress leader said.
Highly critical of the Modi’s effort of engaging the diaspora in particular addressing meetings attended by thousands, the Congress leaders said India has got nothing out of it.
“The sum total of Prime Minister Modi’s 14 months of diplomacy for India is a big zero,” he said.
“Please stop making diplomacy a spectacle,” he said.
“The classic example of that is the manner in which it has handled the relationship with Pakistan,” he alleged.
India, he argued, is no longer in the loop on Afghanistan.
“Today the US is talking of having a civil nuclear deal with Pakistan,” he said.
“Foreign policy is a ideological subset of a party through which you view the world. And therefore the ideological prism of both the Congress and the BJP are completely different whether they come to the idea of India or to the foreign policy,” he said.
PTI