singaNew Delhi: Shashi Tharoor has ridiculed the Union government for summoning Singapore High Commission over Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s remarks on India.
The senior Congress leader said that the government must learn to be “less thin-skinned” rather than pulling up envoys of a friendly country.
“Most unseemly for MEA to summon the HC of a friendly country like Singapore over some remarks by their PM to their own Parliament… He (Singapore PM Lee Hsien Loong) was making a general (&largely accurate) point. Given the stuff our own pols utter, we must learn to be less thin-skinned!” Tharoor tweeted.
“We should have handled the matter with a statement saying ‘we heard with interest the PM’s remarks. But we don’t comment on other countries’ internal matters, nor on debates in foreign Parliaments, and urge everyone to follow the same principle.’ Far more effective and less offensive,” he wrote in another tweet.
India on Thursday protested against the Singapore PM’s observation that almost half of lawmakers in Lok Sabha have criminal charges against them and that there has been a decline in the country’s democratic polity from ‘Nehru’s India’.
Lee, while taking part in a debate in Singapore Parliament, spoke about how a democratic system needs lawmakers with integrity and brought in India’s first PM Jawaharlal Nehru’s reference to stress how democracy should work in the City-state.
