On Tuesday, the Union Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj made a Statement in the Rajya Sabha and declared that 39 Indians who were stranded in Mosul, Iraq were killed by ISIS. After this, a huge ruckus was made in the Lok Sabha by the opposition party.
They started raising slogans just when the Union Foreign Minister was about to make her statement over the same. Amid the slogan shouting, the house speaker Sumitra Mahajan said that the situation was unfortunate and later adjourned the house for the day.
In 2014, a few days after the northern Iraqi city, Mosul got captured by the ISIS, 40 Indian construction workers went missing. Some of these workers made panicking calls to their relatives, seeking help. And for the past years, nothing much happened. The relatives were told not to lose hope by the Indian Government. But this week, the bodies of 39 of those workers were found in a large grave near Mosul. One of the 40 workers, Harjit Masih, had earlier managed to escape from the ISIS.
After failing to make an elaborate statement over the mass death of Indian workers in Iraq, Swaraj decided to address a press meet. While addressing the media, she said,“Today Congress indulged in a very low level of politics, probably Congress president thought how did no uproar happened in Rajya Sabha and decided to ask Scindia Ji to lead protests in Lok Sabha. Playing politics on deaths”.
In the process of elaborating the incident, she said, “Our government does not believe in “missing, believed to be killed”. Declared about the death of 39 Indians only after getting proof. I personally talked to the foreign ministers of the respective countries, I went to them and asked them if they have any evidence they provide us with the same.”
Slamming the haters over the issue of keeping the country in dark about the deaths, Sushma said, “It would have been a sin had we handed over anybody’s body claiming it to be those of our people, just for the sake of closing files.”
Post her press conference, the sister of one of the deceased Indian, Manjinder Singh, said that she feels betrayed because the ministry should have contacted the family as soon as they got the information. “We demand the government provide us DNA reports. It’s being politicised. We had been running from pillar to post since four years and now we’re being told via TV that we lost one of our own,” she said.
