Congress slams Modi for endorsing Trump poll campaign at Houston

The Congress on Monday accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of violating Indian foreign policy’s “time-honoured convention” of not interfering in domestic elections of another country by “actively campaigning” for US President Donald Trump at the ‘Howdy, Modi’ event in Houston.

The opposition party said Modi was in the US as India’s Prime Minister and not as a “star campaigner” in the US elections.

Addressing the media, senior Congress leader Anand Sharma said: “Our relationship with the United States have throughout been bipartisan, vis-à-vis Republicans and Democrats. Your actively campaigning for Trump is a breach of both India and America as sovereign nations and democracies. Mr Prime Minister, you have violated the time-honoured principle of Indian foreign policy of not interfering in the domestic elections of another country.

“This is a singular disservice to the long-term strategic interests of India.”

Sharma said Modi should have honoured the convention that “we do not take a partisan position in domestic electoral politics” of another country. “It should not be seen that India is taking positions or sides, and the Prime Minister using that platform to exhort and raising that slogan on ‘Abki Baar, Trump Sarkar’ was better avoided,” the Congress leader said.

Sharma said India has engaged with both a Republican administration and Democrat administration in the past. “It was a Republican administration under President Bush — and we had Prime Minister Manmohan Singh — when we successfully negotiated the Indo-US nuclear deal, but when the US elections came Prime Minister Singh, and for that matter the Indian leadership, did not take a partisan position to support or endorse the Republicans,” he said.

“When Barack Obama took over as US President, we carried forward that engagement as effectively as we had done with the previous Republican administration,” the Rajya Sabha member said.