Katchatheevu Row: Chidambaram Questions Jaishankar’s ‘Somersault’, Calls Him ‘RSS-BJP Mouthpiece’

Chennai: Senior Congress leader P Chidambaram slammed Union External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar over his comments on the ongoing Katchatheevu island row.

Taking a dig at Jaishankar, the former Union Finance minister took to social media to state that people can “change colours” quickly.

“Tit for tat is old. Tweet for tweet is the new weapon,” Chidambaram wrote on micro-blogging site X.

Reacting to Jaishankar’s criticism of the DMK and Congress that those two parties approached the island issue as though “they have no responsibility for it,” Chidambaram reminded him of an RTI reply of January 2015.

“Will foreign minister Mr Jaishankar please refer to the RTI reply dated 27-1-2015… I believe that Mr Jaishankar was the Foreign Secretary on 27-1-2015. The Reply justified the circumstances under which India acknowledged that a small island belonged to Sri Lanka. Why is the Foreign Minister and his ministry doing a somersault now? How quickly can people change colours,” the veteran Congress leader tweeted.

Chidambaram didn’t stop there.

Calling Jaishankar a “suave liberal foreign service officer” who went on to become a “smart foreign secretary” to a “mouthpiece of the RSS-BJP”, Chidambaram further wrote: “Life and times of Mr Jaishankar will be recorded in the annals of acrobatic sports.”

Chidambaram acknowledged in another tweet that Indian fishermen have been detained in Sri Lanka in the last 50 years, but questioned whether the same did not happen when the BJP and Modi government were in power.

“It is true that Fishermen were detained in the last 50 years. Likewise, India has detained many SL fishermen. Were not Fishermen detained by Sri Lanka when Mr Vajpayee was PM? Were not fishermen detained by Sri Lanka when Mr Modi was in power since 2014?” Chidambaram posed.

Earlier in the day, Jaishankar said that in the last 20 years, 6,184 Indian fishermen have been detained by Sri Lanka and 1,175 Indian fishing vessels seized, detained or apprehended.

“This is the background of the issue that we are discussing… In the last five years, the Katchatheevu issue and the fisherman’s issue have been repeatedly raised by various parties in Parliament. It has come up in parliament questions, debates and in the consultative committee. The then Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu has written to me numerous times. And my record shows that to the current Chief Minister, I have replied 21 times on this issue. This is not an issue which has suddenly surfaced. This is a live issue,” the External Affairs Minister added.

“We know who did this, what we don’t know is who hid it. We believe that the public has the right to know how this situation came up,” Jaishankar said.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi brought up the Katchatheevu island issue during an election rally, attacking the Congress over its decision to hand over the strategic island to Sri Lanka in the 1970s.

Also Read: Katchatheevu Row: PM Modi Slams DMK, Jaishankar Says ‘PM Nehru Wanted To Give It Away’