Unsurprisingly, Imran Khan has come under fire from Indian officials after offering to help the country’s poor by sharing in-depth details about the Ehsaas Project with the Indian Government.
The PM tweeted the following on Thursday:
Our govt successfully transferred Rs. 120 billion in 9 weeks to over 10 million families in a transparent manner to deal with the COVID19 fallout on the poor.
— Imran Khan (@ImranKhanPTI) June 11, 2020
The offer of help did not sit well with Indian officials, of course, as the spokesperson for India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) Anurag Srivastava responded, “Pakistan would do well to recall that they have a debt problem which covers 90% of their GDP. As far as India goes, our stimulus package is as large as the GDP of Pakistan,”
Islamabad responded to the negative remarks made my Delhi in the following statement:
“Remarks by the MEA spokesperson reflect an unprofessional attempt at point-scoring over a serious issue that involves the lives of millions of poor people in the subcontinent, worst affected by the COVID-19 pandemic,”
The Foreign Office (FO) regretted “negative remarks by the MEA spokesperson regarding a goodwill suggestion by the PM to share Pakistan’s successful experience in ameliorating the impact of COVID-19 on the poorest sections of the society”.
The saga between Pakistan and India continues with no signs of relations between the neighbouring countries improving. In the grand scheme of things, the Coronavirus pandemic should take precedence over all other issues and the world would do better coming together to lift each other up than tear each other down.