Former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's controversial claims about India and its former Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj have ruffled feathers with External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar slamming it as 'disrespectful.'
In his new book 'Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love,' Pompeo has made some stunning allegations about how Sushma Swaraj was not "an important player on the Indian foreign policy team" and "India-Pakistan rivalry came to spilling over into a nuclear conflagration in February 2019."
"On the Indian side, my original counterpart was not an important player on the Indian foreign policy team. Instead, I worked much more closely with National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, a close and trusted confidant of Prime Minister Narendra Modi," Pompeo says in his book.
However, the former US official, who was the CIA Director in Trump administration from 2017 to 2018 and then served as the Secretary of State from 2018 to 2021, was all praise for the current External Affairs Minister Jaishankar who he called "professional, rational, and a fierce defender of his boss and his country."
"My second Indian counterpart was Subrahmanyam Jaishankar. In May 2019, we welcomed "J" as India's new foreign minister. I could not have asked for a better counterpart. I love this guy. English is one of the seven languages he speaks, and his is somewhat better than mine," Pompeo adds.
"We hit it off immediately. In our first meeting, I was bemoaning, in very diplomatic speech, that his predecessor had not been particularly helpful," he said.
"He (Jaishankar) said that he could see why I had trouble with his predecessor, a goofball and a heartland political hack. "Careful, I'm a heartland political hack!" I replied in jest. He laughed, noting that if that were true, it would make me the first heartland political hack who had ever been an editor on the Harvard Law Review. Well played, J," Pompeo said.
However, his remarks did not go down well with Jaishankar, who called the remarks disgraceful. Jaishankar told PTI, "I have seen a passage in Secretary Pompeo’s book referring to Sushma Swaraj ji. I always held her in great esteem and had an exceptionally close and warm relationship with her. I deplore the disrespectful colloquialism used for her."
On Quad
In his book, Pompeo added that India was forced to change its strategic posture and join the four-nation Quad grouping due to China's aggressive actions. Claiming that India has charted an independent course on foreign policy, Pompeo calls India a wild card in Quad because it was a nation founded on socialist ideology and spent the Cold War aligning with neither the US nor the erstwhile USSR.
"The country (India) has always charted its own course without a true alliance system, and that is still mostly the case. But China's actions have caused India to change its strategic posture in the last few years," Pompeo writes.
The 59-year-old former official also explains how the Donald Trump administration succeeded in bringing India on board the Quad grouping.
"In June 2020, Chinese soldiers clubbed twenty Indian soldiers to death in a border skirmish. That bloody incident caused the Indian public to demand a change in their country's relationship with China," Pompeo writes.
"India banned TikTok and dozens of Chinese apps as part of its response. And a Chinese virus was killing hundreds of thousands of Indian citizens. I was sometimes asked why India had moved away from China, and my answer came straight from what I heard from Indian leadership: 'Wouldn't you?' times were changing and creating an opportunity for us to try something new and pull the US and India more closely together than ever," Pompeo writes.
'Stole millions of dollars '
Not just Jaishankar, Pompeo's scathing remarks about the former Afghanistan goverment being corrupt and stealing aid money has been countered by the country's former vice-president.
In his memoir, Pompeo said that Afghanistan's former president, Ashraf Ghani, and Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah "led cartels that stole millions of dollars in aid money from the United States." He said that one of the main reasons for collapsing the entire political system was the high level of corruption and the "crooked system of patronage in the country." Pompeo added that in his opinion, "low-level corruption secured a measure of stability" and prevented the country from collapsing, Afghan-based news agency Khaama Press reported.
However, former Afghanistan vice president Amrullah Saleh responded to the remarks, stating that Pompeo's book was full of lies.
"Government of Afghanistan was not an obstacle to peace. Pompeo's book is full of lies. President Ghani has repeatedly said that he is willing to hold early elections according to the United Nations schedule and to protect values in the transfer of power. But the Taliban considered the elections as their destruction and still do," Saleh tweeted from his official Twitter handle @AmrullahSaleh2 on Wednesday.
US reaction
When asked about former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's book, State Department spokesperson Ned Price said Pompeo "was expressing the view as a private citizen as his right."
