A day after Congress leader Shashi Tharoor ‘admitted’ to wiping ‘egg off his face’ and conceded that India’s diplomatic stance gave the country a unique position to be friendly with both Russia and Ukraine, two nations at war since 2022, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesperson Shehzad Poonawalla said that he hopes Rahul Gandhi would not “act against” Tharoor for being candid over India’s foreign policy.
“Congress MP Shashi Tharoor has agreed that Congress’s own stance on Russia-Ukraine was wrong and the things (PM) Modi and Indian government has done was completely right. Today we are in a position that we can hug Putin (Russian President) and Zelenskyy (Ukraine President) and even US,” Poonawalla said in a self-made video.
The BJP spokesperson was referencing comments made by Tharoor on March 18 during the Raisaina Dialogue 2025 held in the national capital.
Tharoor had said that he seems to be ‘wiping egg off his face,’ conceding that despite himself calling for the condemnation of Russia’s war with Ukraine, three years later India is in a unique position to be friendly with both countries and be welcomed by both leaders.
“I am still wiping the egg off my face because I was one person in the parliamentary debate who actually criticised the Indian position at the time back in February 2022,” Tharoor said.
Explaining his reasoning for condemning the war, Tharoor continued, “On the well-worn grounds that Espen (Norway’s Foreign Minister) will understand because he and I talked about all this in my UN days, that there was a violation of the UN Charter, sovereignty of a member state, namely Ukraine, and we had always stood for the that there had been a violation of the principle of the inviolability of borders of a sovereign state, inadmissibility of the use of force to settle international disputes and all of those principles had been violated by one party, and we should have condemned it.”
“Well, 3 years later, it does look like I am the one with egg on my face because clearly, the policy has meant that India actually has a Prime Minister who can hug both the president of Ukraine and the president of Moscow two weeks apart and be accepted in both places and therefore India is in a position where it can make a difference to a lasting peace if it was so required in ways that very few countries would be able to,” Tharoor added.
Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, since then, the United States President has been having “productive conversations” with Russian President Vladamir Putin, talking about a ceasefire, and ending the “horrible war,” as said by President Trump on Truth Social.
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