Jaishankar to reply on debate over Ukraine in Lok Sabha tomorrow

Union external affairs minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar will reply to the debate over Ukraine in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday, news agency ANI reported. The Lok Sabha is discussing the Ukraine situation under rule 193, the notice for which was given by RSP MP NK Premachandran and Congress MP Manish Tewari.

The members of parliament are keen to know the situation in Ukraine and India's political stand on Russia and Ukraine. The MPs also want to understand how the government is planning to accommodate the Indian students who were brought from the war-hit country via special planes.

Many students who were in their later years of college for medical education and see their future in a limbo with the college infrastructure completely destroyed in Ukraine.

Earlier in the day, the Modi government briefed the house over the evacuation of Indians under Operation Ganga. Union minister Hardeep Puri said Operation Ganga was one of the most well-coordinated and successful evacuation missions anywhere in the world.

“Operation Ganga will rank as one of the most well-coordinated and successful humanitarian evacuation missions undertaken by any country, anywhere,” the minister said.

Puri was among the four union ministers sent to oversee evacuation operations in countries sharing borders with Ukraine, the other three being Kiren Rijiju, Jyotiraditya Scindia and VK Singh.

During a written statement to the Rajya Sabha last month, Jaishankar had said that 22,500 Indians and 147 foreign nationals had been brought back home from war-hit Ukraine.

“We carried out the biggest campaign to evacuate citizens from a conflict zone. Several countries expressed their inability to evacuate their citizens. But we didn't do that. We even airlifted citizens from other countries,” union civil aviation minister Jyotiraditya Scindia said.

However, Congress MP Manish Tewari during the debate accused the Centre of forcing evacuated students to chant pro-government slogans.

“India has a long history of conducting such evacuations and it has conducted 23 such evacuations since 1962-63, including from Burma, Kuwait, Lebanon and Libya,” Tewari said as he lauded the way students were brought back from the European nation.

"But I regret to say that I have never seen the kind of chest thumping and the kind of self congratulatory ecstacy that was at display during the recent evacuations. Making young students chant slogans in favour of the government in aeroplanes by ministers of the government of India, I think it was a self-defeating spectacle," he said.
 

(With ANI inputs)