PDP president Mehbooba Mufti on Sunday said Prime Minister Narendra Modi missed an opportunity at the BRICS summit to reiterate India’s historic role as a champion of global human rights.
“The way our prime minister, as the chair of BRICS and as a host, should have spoken, the intensity with which he should have spoken, I feel he shied away.
He chose his words very very cautiously,” she told reporters here.
An “independent foreign policy”
“It (India) has always taken pride in having an independent foreign policy, non-alignment, since Jawaharlal Nehru’s time. “The BRICS was such a platform where our country, our prime minister should have spoken forcefully about it, rather he should have initiated the declaration, he should have been on the forefront. However, we didn’t say anything from our side about Gaza where 20,000-22,000 innocent children were martyred. After that the leadership in Iran was martyred, some 150 school girls were killed inside a school.
There was no word from our side,” the former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir said. India has had an independent foreign policy and New Delhi has never been a “sidekick” even to a superpower like America, she said. “Unfortunately, for the last many years our foreign policy is completely changing, we are being selective in condemning terrorist attacks,” she said. Somewhere we have lacked, somewhere we are compromising many of our values, our country’s principles,” she said. The PDP president said while the world is loving towards a multi-polar world order, New Delhi is still stuck in the superpower syndrome.
