New Delhi:
The Indian government is “not aware” of any specific threat against Air India and its passengers, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said Monday evening at the NDTV World Summit.
Mr Jaishankar’s remark came hours after Khalistani terrorist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun – whom the United States believes was the subject of a murder-for-hire plot involving ex-Indian spy Vikas Yadav – released a video statement online warning people not to fly Air India between November 1 and 19.
The threat follows a worrying flood of bomb threats against Indian passenger jets, including those operated by Air India and Air India Xpress; over 100 such threats have been made in the past week.
“I am not aware of any specific threat today… but we have seen threats, in the past, to our airlines, to our Parliament, to our diplomats and High Commissions, and our leaders,” Mr Jaishankar said.
“And all that is a source of concern…” he said.
Jaishankar Jabs Canada
Mr Jaishankar may have sidestepped the question on the threat, but took the opportunity to take more sharp digs at the Canadian government amid a tense diplomatic stand-off over the killing of another Khalistani terrorist – Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen – in Vancouver in June last year.
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“These threats are cleverly worded… they (the Canadian government) calls this ‘freedom of speech’. But my question to them is – if you receive these threats would you take them lightly?”
“If it was your airline being threatened, your Parliament, your diplomats… this is exactly the kind of problem with which we started this conversation,” Mr Jaishankar told NDTV.
Earlier in the interview with NDTV’s Sanjay Pugalia, he also spoke of ‘double standards’ in the way Canada treats Indian diplomats and the ‘license’ their officials allowed themselves while in India.
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The Indian government has been fiercely critical of its Canadian counterpart giving space – physical and political – to individuals it considers terrorists with designs against India’s sovereignty.
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Last week – after Canadian federal police claimed top Indian diplomats in that country were working with organised criminal gangs, such as the Lawrence Bishnoi outfit – Delhi pointed out Ottawa had “consciously provided space to violent extremists and terrorists to harass, threaten and intimidate Indian diplomats”. This, Delhi complained, had been “justified in the name of freedom of speech”.
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