Hamid Ansari, The former vice president of India has hit back at the Bhartiya Janta Party after they accused him of “violating the law” by inviting a Pakistani Journalist to India who shared having shared “Sensitive” information collected in India to Pakistani spy agency ISI.
The BJP on Wednesday took up “TV and social media” reports on the issues and said that former Vice President Hamid Ansari had invited him to India and that he had shared the information he collected during his visits with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and demanded a response from Ansari and the Congress. Ansari refuted the reports and the BJP’s charges as a “litany of falsehood.”
Mirza, a Pakistani journalist, has claimed that former Vice President Ansari invited him to India five times between 2005-2011, BJP alleged.
The BJP spokesperson said that both the Congress, which was in power then and Ansari should tell the nation whether these instances occurred. Bhatia alleged that Ansari had invited a person from “a country that is known to support terrorism to speak about counter-terrorism”.
Hamid Ansari, who has been vocal against BJP’s anti-minority campaign responding to the allegations said, “Yesterday and today a litany of falsehood has been unleashed on me personally in the sections of the media and by the official spokesman of the Bharatiya Janata Party,”
He denied ever having invited the Pakistani journalist, Nusrat Mirza or having him in a conference in New Delhi on ‘Terrorism’.
He said that BJP was making the false allegation against the former President that while as Ambassador to Iran, he had betrayed the national interest in a matter for which allegations have made by a former official of a Government agency.
“It is a known fact that invitation to foreign dignitaries by the Vice-President of India are on the advice of the Government generally through the Ministry of External Affairs. I had inaugurated the Conference on Terrorism, on December 11, 2010, the ‘International Conference of Jurists on International Terrorism and Human Rights’. As is the normal practice the list of invitees would have been drawn by the organisers. I never invited him or met him,” Hamid Ansari said.
“My work as Ambassador to Iran was at all times within the knowledge of the Government of the day. I am bound by the commitment to national security in such matters and refrain from commenting on them. The Government of India has all the information and is the only authority to tell the truth. It is a matter of record that after my stint in Tehran I was appointed India’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York. My work there has been acknowledged at home and abroad,” Hamid Ansari said.