Washington: External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar has slammed former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for the latter's 'disrespectful' remarks used to refer to former EAM Sushma Swaraj in his latest book 'Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love'.
Pompeo has said he never saw his counterpart Sushma Swaraj as an "important political player" but got along famously with Jaishankar, hitting it off with him in their first meeting itself. In his latest book that hit the stores on Tuesday, Pompeo describes Swaraj somewhat disparagingly, using the American slang words "goofball" and "heartland political hack" for her.
Commenting on Pompeo's claims, Jaishankar told PTI, "I have seen a passage in Secretary Pompeo's book referring to Smt 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." In his book, Pompeo also says American neglect of India was a decades-long bipartisan failure.
Swaraj served as external affairs minister in the first Modi government from May 2014 to May 2019. She died in August 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," 59-year-old Pompeo writes in his book.
A confidant of then US president Donald Trump, Pompeo was the CIA Director in his administration from 2017 to 2018 and then served as the Secretary of State from 2018 to 2021. "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," writes the former top American diplomat, who is now exploring the possibility of a 2024 presidential run. "Professional, rational, and a fierce defender of his boss and his country," is how Pompeo described Jaishankar.
"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. J here stands for Jaishankar.
India, Pakistan came close to nuclear exchanges soon after Balakot: Pompeo
Pompeo also claimed in his book that Sushma Swaraj woke him up for a phone conversation to tell him that Pakistan was preparing for a nuclear attack after the Balakot surgical strike in February 2019 and that India too was preparing to retaliate. The phone call, according to Pompeo, came when he was in Hanoi for the US-North Korea Summit on February 27-28 and his team then had to work through the night with both New Delhi and Islamabad to avert this crisis.
“I’ll never forget the night I was in Hanoi, Vietnam when – as if negotiating with the North Koreans on nuclear weapons wasn’t enough – India and Pakistan started threatening each other in connection with a decades-long dispute over the northern border region of Kashmir. I do not think the world properly knows just how close the India-Pakistan rivalry came to spilling over into a nuclear conflagration in February 2019. The truth is, I don’t know precisely the answer either; I just know it was too close,” wrote Pompeo in the book.
“After an Islamist terrorist attack in Kashmir--probably enabled in part by Pakistan’s lax counter-terror policies – killed 40 Indians, India responded with an air strike against terrorists inside Pakistan. The Pakistanis shot down a plane in a subsequent dogfight and kept the Indian pilot prisoner,” he said. “In Hanoi, I was awakened to speak with my Indian counterpart. He believed the Pakistanis had begun to prepare their nuclear weapons for a strike. India, he informed me, was contemplating its own escalation. I asked him to do nothing and give us a minute to sort things out (sic),” wrote Pompeo, mistakenly referring to Swaraj as “he”.
“I began to work with Ambassador (then NSA John) Bolton, who was with me in the tiny secure communications facility in our hotel. I reached the actual leader of Pakistan, (Army chief) Gen. (Qamar Javed) Bajwa, with whom I had engaged many times. I told him what the Indians had told me. He said it wasn’t true,” narrates Pompeo. “As one might expect, he believed the Indians were preparing their nuclear weapons for deployment. It took us a few hours – and remarkably good work by our teams on the ground in New Delhi and Islamabad – to convince each side that the other was not preparing for nuclear war.” (With agency inputs)
