Modi failed to defend India’s interest during meet with Trump

NEW DELHI, Jun 19: The Congress on Thursday launched an attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) over his engagement with US President Donald Trump at the G7 Summit, alleging failures in defending India’s strategic, economic and sovereign interests.

In a statement issued by the party’s foreign affairs department, it said that the PM could have taken the leverage of the event to assert India’s role in Global South.

“The Congress had hoped that Prime Minister Narendra Modi would leverage the G7 Summit in France as an opportunity to assert India’s leadership role in the Global South and stridently defend India’s energy sovereignty, economic interests, and strategic autonomy. Instead, the Summit exposed a troubling gap between rhetoric and results,” the party said in the statement.

The grand old party accused Modi of failing to secure an Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctions waiver that would have allowed India to continue importing Russian oil. “This is a missed opportunity, and further compounds the BJP government’s repeated capitulation on matters of India’s energy sovereignty (first by ending purchases of discounted oil from Iran and Venezuela, and then by scaling back imports from Russia),” said the statement, adding that it would burden Indians with higher fuel and consumer prices.�" HT