Kolkata: Advocating a “proactive” foreign policy, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi Tuesday asked how Italy had dared to take on India after its marines shot dead two Indian fishermen.
“Even Italy tries to frighten us,” he said at a meeting of business chambers here. “This was a diplomatic matter. But the Supreme Court had to get involved. Why?”
Modi’s reference was to the Italian government’s refusal to send back the two marines to India after they were allowed to travel to Italy to vote in elections.
The marines eventually returned to face trial in India after diplomatic negotiations and after the Supreme Court barred the Italian ambassador from leaving New Delhi.
Without taking his name, the Bharatiya Janata Party leader mocked at former external affairs minister S.M. Krishna who read out a part of his Portuguese counterpart’s speech at the UN in February 2011.
“(This is why) people laugh at us.”
Modi said trade relations today mattered in diplomacy and regretted that India had failed to give leadership even to the SAARC grouping on economic issues.
According to him, India was “a small soldier” in most international groupings and this needed to change. India, he said, needed a “proactive” foreign policy.
-IANS
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India already has a proactive foreign policy..diplomacy is not about threatening other nations or to show its might(and which unfortunately India cannot afford to do so because she neither has military might like USA or is an economic superpower, which some people believe she is)….regarding the Italian marines, there are still some complex legal issues that have to be solved first before it goes to trial…whether jurisdiction actually falls within Indian territory .but one my friend told me once that if an Indian army personal mistakenly kills some civilians during duty thinking them to be terrorists, say in kashmir or in North east, they are never tried in the civilian courts….even in court martial proceedings they have been let go free or given lenient punishments..he sees this as a double standard of Indian government…But of course the so called patriots of India will never see their own mistakes but will see others