In a strongly worded letter on Thursday, Congress president Sonia Gandhi urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi “to intensify all diplomatic efforts” required to ensure the safety and secure the release of the 40 Indians abducted in Iraq.
Assuring Mr. Modi that the Congress would fully support “all diplomatic efforts to achieve this objective,” Ms. Gandhi said that it was “imperative to act swiftly to evacuate all our nationals in the region and ensure their safe return.”
Ms. Gandhi’s letter came even as the External Affairs Ministry said that the location of those abducted had been “identified,” and relatives of those missing met External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj earlier in the day to plead with her to ensure that the government left no stone unturned in getting their loved ones back.
Ms. Gandhi’s letter came at the end of a day in which several Congress leaders — including Ambika Soni, Anand Sharma and Mani Shankar Aiyar— mounted pressure on the government to act swiftly to resolve what is Mr. Modi’s first major crisis.
If the tone of Ms. Gandhi’s letter was firm, Ms. Soni and Mr. Sharma were sharp in their comments, taking on the BJP-led NDA government frontally on the issue of Indian hostages in Iraq on Thursday, saying there had been some “laxity” somewhere.
While Mr. Sharma said that the government must intensify its efforts for evacuation and ensure return of all its citizens from Iraq, Ms. Soni wondered what kind of monitoring the government was doing that it did not know who had kidnapped the Indians and where they were being kept.
“It’s very good that the External Affairs Minister is monitoring it but that monitoring should have been done much before,” Ms. Soni told journalists.
