Opp slams Govt: Should have started airlift of students earlier

The Congress said the government should have anticipated the crisis and made better preparations when tensions between Russia and Ukraine worsened and Moscow started amassing its troops at the border.

While senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said the condition of Indians stranded in Ukraine was worsening and accused the government of “not taking effective steps to bring them home”, his party colleagues Shashi Tharoor and Manish Tewari asked the government to scale up its efforts.

Targeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Rahul said he was missing. Leader of the Opposition in Rajya Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge said Modi’s top priority should have been the 20,000 students, but he was focused on delivering speeches instead.“It is very clear that we have been caught napping as a country with such a large number of vulnerable civilians… 20,000 medical students and so on. We, arguably, should have made better preparations,” said Tharoor.

He said the US had been talking about the impending war for some weeks. “It was like a chronicle of a war foretold kind of situation and yet we are scrambling now to catch up… We have to now focus on increasing the numbers of our officials and others who will actually be on the ground and at the border crossing points… Secondly, we should persuade the Ukrainians to help us move people from the interiors to the borders…. although the Indian stand at the UN has made things difficult,” he said.

“When the situation had started becoming portentous, we should have acted with dispatch and started getting people much earlier. Obviously, we have an embassy there. The embassy must have been sending regular inputs that the situation is deteriorating. You have an embassy in Russia, in Belarus… you have missions in all the countries around Ukraine. You have your own intelligence. You are in contact with foreign intelligence services… there is open source intelligence which is available about the scale and scope of what is happening…. when Mr Putin decided to shift heavy armour from Siberia all the way to the Ukrainian border… anyone who understand the logistics of war obviously knew that he was not joking,” said Tewari.

CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury said the Modi government had sufficient time to evacuate Indians, with Russia declaring its military intentions earlier on. “Instead, the focus is on propaganda, spin and photo-ops. The government must get its act together and evacuate hapless Indians like it did during the Gulf War,” he said.

Both Tewari and Tharoor said the Indians stranded in the interior of Ukraine don’t have resources to reach the borders.

Tewari said a large number of people are stranded in the eastern part of Ukraine, and the Indian government will have to talk to Russia to evacuate them. “Merely by positioning ministers…you are not going to create miracles. What is required is a far greater amount of logistics,” he said.

Meanwhile, Congress leader P Chidambaram tweeted: “It is good that the PM is taking a series of meetings on the Ukraine crisis, but he should call a meeting of the leaders of the Opposition parties too. It is Government’s prerogative to formulate a foreign policy and diplomatic response to an international crisis, but the government should take the Opposition into confidence so that there is a national consensus”.