Picture : ANI/X
Senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor has said he understands the Indian government’s desire to take a cautious stand on the conflict between US-Israel and Iran, and hoped that it could make a public call to both sides to end the war quickly.
In an interview with PTI, the former minister of state for external affairs also stated that the government should have immediately offered public condolences to Iran over the death of its former supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and acted on similar lines as it had done in the aftermath of the demise of then Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash in 2024.
Tharoor asserted that in the current circumstances, a good group of countries not party to the conflict on either side could go to both sides and ask them to call off the conflict, and India should be at the forefront of this.
Asked about assertions from various quarters that India should have condemned the assassination of Khamenei in a US-Israel strike, Tharoor said, “I don’t know about condemning it, but we should certainly have condoled it. After all (he was) the spiritual leader of a country with which he have friendly relations. It would have been appropriate, the day it happened, for us to express public condolences and share the grief of his loved ones and of his nation just as two years ago when president Raisi was killed in a helicopter crash, we immediately issued a condolence as well as announced national mourning.”
Tharoor noted that the moment the Iranian embassy opened the condolence book, Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri went and signed the book, which was a “good thing”, he said.
“But I guess we could have been a bit more… it is simply the courteous thing to do for any country. For example, the president of some faraway country, with which we do not even have such a close relation, were to be such a victim, it would be odd for us not to offer condolences,” Tharoor said.
“But apart from that, I think I understand the government’s desire to take, for the lack of a better word, a cautious stand,” he said.
Tharoor said India has enormous stakes in what is going on and its energy security is dependent on the situation in the Gulf, including its LPG and LNG imports.
“We have 9 million of our citizens living there, which are an important source of remittances, and their safety and well-being is naturally a priority, there are investments coming to us from countries like the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and we have very important overall trade relations as well as political interest and security cooperation, all of that.
“You don’t want to see that jeopardised. So for us, peace and stability in the Middle East-West Asia is extremely important,” the Congress MP from Thiruvananthapuram said.
On top of that, he said, the conflict has already affected people in India.
“There are dhabas closing down because of shortages of gas cylinders, there are situations where my friends in Hyderabad are saying no one can cook ‘haleem’ anymore because it is slow-cooking dish, there are challenges now in the coming election campaigns, where are we going to stop for chai when ‘chaiwalas’ don’t have LPG cylinders? I am not joking, these are genuine concerns affecting the Indian kitchen and the average Indian household,” Tharoor said.
