Ministerial visits are usually fairly boring and anodyne as everything is often scripted in advance, or should be. Clearly, this was not the case with the visit of Polish Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski to New Delhi earlier this week.
Towards the end of his somewhat standard welcoming remarks, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar told Sikorski that India was unhappy over the “selective targeting” of India on account of the Ukraine conflict which New Delhi considered “unfair and unjustified.”
He was referring to the European Union’s sanctions against India’s trade and oil imports from Russia. Broadly, he was also referring to the critique that is visited on India on account of its refusal to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
But what clearly triggered Jaishankar’s ire was Poland’s dealings with Pakistan. Putting it in blunt diplomatese, Jaishankar added that he hoped to discuss with Sikorski the need to “display zero tolerance for terrorism and not help fuel the terrorist infrastructure in our neighbourhood.”