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ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Imran Khan snubbed Indian media, saying the RSS ideology was the main hurdle in normalizing ties with Pakistan.
The prime minister, who was in Tashkent to participate in a conference, responded to the question by an Indian journalist who sought Pakistan’s stance on talks with India.
“Imran sahab, just answer a small question,” said a journalist, associated with India’s Asian News International (ANI) agency. “Can talks and terrorism go together? This is a simple question for you from India,” asked the unidentified journalist.
The prime minister seemed unfazed by the challenge. “We have been trying to tell India … that we have been waiting for a long time, let’s live like civilized neighbours but what to do, as the RSS ideology has come in the way,” the prime minister said.
The Indian news agency shared the video on their Twitter account, attempting to spin the encounter by claiming that the Pakistani prime minister had ‘evaded’ a question on whether Islamabad controlled the Taliban or not.
#WATCH Pakistan PM Imran Khan answers ANI question, ‘can talks and terror go hand in hand?’. Later he evades the question on whether Pakistan is controlling the Taliban.
Khan is participating in the Central-South Asia conference, in Tashkent, Uzbekistan pic.twitter.com/TYvDO8qTxk
— ANI (@ANI) July 16, 2021
It must be mentioned that ANI had featured prominently in the EU DisInfoLab’s revelations in December 2020 regarding worldwide disinformation networks associated with the Indian government to malign Pakistan. There have been several incidents in which ANI had ‘amplified’ fake news and disinformation forwarded to it by fake platforms in a bid to tarnish Pakistan.
The prime minister has very clear views about the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its extremist policies. In an earlier tweet, the Prime Minister had pointed that the “RSS ideology of Hindu supremacy, like the Nazi Aryanupremacy, will not stop in IOK; instead, it will lead to suppression of Muslims in India & eventually lead to targeting of Pakistan. The Hindu Supremacists version of Hitler’s Lebensraum.”
