Two days after the Supreme Court directed the Centre to do so, a pregnant woman who was deported to Bangladesh despite being an Indian citizen was brought back to the country along with her eight-year-old son. Sonali Khatun, who is nine months pregnant, and the child entered India on Friday in West Bengal's Malda in the presence of several officials from the district administration. Khatun, her husband, Danish Sheikh, and their eight-year-old son were among six people who were pushed across the border into Bangladesh on June 27 after being picked up by the Delhi police earlier that month on charges of being Bangladeshi citizens who had entered the country illegally. The woman's father, Bhodu Sheikh, had told the Supreme Court that she and her child were waiting on the Bangladesh side to enter India. On Wednesday, a bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi had directed the Centre to bring back Khatun, and the government had agreed to do so...
Congress MP Shashi Tharoor recalled with pride how a word he coined 20 years ago on geopolitical alignments has become truer today. He also shed light on the dinner invite to the Rashtrapati Bhavan in the presence of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who came on a two-day state visit.
The reason for his presence at the Rashtrapati Bhavan on Friday night, Tharoor indicated, had more relevance to his work as the chairman of the parliamentary standing committee on external affairs.
"I have come back [to Rashtrapati Bhawan] after a while. For some years I think they had a different attitude. This time it seems that they have decided to open up a little more to other voices, and frankly because the relationships with foreign countries are precisely what the parliamentary standing committee deals with, it's helpful to have some insight into what goes on in the conversations, the atmosphere and so on. So I'm very pleased to be here for that reason. Nothing more, nothing less," Tharoor told NDTV CEO and Editor-in-Chief Rahul Kanwal after the state dinner that he described as "excellent".
Many Congress leaders including Pawan Khera and Jairam Ramesh had raised questions over party MP and Leaders of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi and the Rajya Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge not being invited to the state dinner.
The reactions came after Tharoor confirmed to reporters outside parliament earlier today that he got an invitation to the state dinner and he would be going. To a question about the Leaders of Opposition in the two houses not on the guest list, he said he wasn't aware on what basis the invitations were sent, but he was definitely honoured to be invited.
Tharoor clarified that the question of cooperating and working with the government as an MP for the betterment of his constituency was "a different conversation" which has no link with getting invited to the Rashtrapati Bhavan dinner.
"That has nothing to do with getting invited to Rashtrapati Bhavan which may or may not happen otherwise. But the truth is that on the question of cooperating with the government of the day, you don't abandon your convictions or principles but you find common ground. I mean part of democracy and part of the cooperation between government and Opposition in a democracy is about finding common ground. We disagree on some things, we agree on some things, and where we agree we should work together," said the Congress MP who in recent times has been speaking good about the government, much to the chagrin of his party.
But given the remarks that Tharoor has been giving, and the Congress repeatedly expressing disappointment over the government's choice every time it needed to invite an Opposition party leader for national work - such as India sending delegations to other nations to brief them about Operation Sindoor, with Tharoor as one of the members of the outreach teams - the question is would the Congress MP from Kerala's Thiruvananthapuram make a huge move sometime?
Tharoor gave a measured and cryptic response: "...I don't know why this has to be asked. I mean I'm an MP of the Congress party. I went to great trouble to get elected. It would take a considerable amount of thought and various other considerations to be anything else."
He said he has a job to do for voters and is doing his very best to fulfill obligations to them.
"Even today in some of the conversations before we all sat down to dinner, I was trying to plug certain things for my constituency with some of the officials I was coming across here from our own government. So that's part of the life blood of getting things done for your people, your voters, your constituency. That's political responsibility," he added.
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