‘India’s Handling of Afghanistan Crisis Flawed’, Opposition Slams Gov’t for Not Talking to Taliban

The Indian government is making last minute efforts to evacuate its citizens and staff in Afghanistan since the Taliban* took over the reins of the country. Indian Ambassador to Afghanistan Rudrendra Tandon was evacuated along with his family, security personnel, and journalists on Tuesday morning on a special flight.

The Narendra Modi government’s handling of the Afghanistan crisis has come under severe criticism from opposition leaders, who have dubbed New Delhi’s strategy as being flawed. 

Sitaram Yechury, general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) slammed the government for its alleged failure in planning the evacuation of Indians from Afghanistan much earlier.

“The world must understand that it is not the fact the US withdrew from Afghanistan so abruptly. The fact is that the US should never have gone there”, he added.

Former Foreign Minister and Trinamool Congress leader Yashwant Sinha also suggested the Indian authorities talk to the Taliban openly and transparently, “not secretly behind closed doors”.

MP and a prominent Muslim leader, Asaduddin Owaisi, said that India should have opened a dialogue with the Taliban before it had full control of Afghanistan. 

Owaisi, taking to Twitter, posted videos of his speech in parliament in 2015, when he questioned the government about what steps were being taken to safeguard the country’s interests as the “Taliban is going to come back for sure”, Owaisi wrote, saying: “You were warned”.

But it isn’t only the opposition that has trained its guns at the federal BJP government. Subramanian Swamy, a BJP MP, said that India’s “weakness” before the Taliban “is bad for our national integrity and image”.

​Congress, the country’s main opposition party, took a dig at the BJP government for not discussing the Afghanistan issue in the Indian Parliament.

Sourse: sputniknews.com