THE OPPOSITION parties said on Monday that the BJP-led government was “caught napping” on the timely evacuation of Indians from Ukraine, and asked it to redouble its efforts, including intensifying engagement with Kyiv's neighbours in the west and southwest, sending more aircraft, and rushing more officials to the border points.
The Congress said the government should have anticipated the crisis and made better preparations when tensions between Russia and Ukraine worsened and Moscow started amassing its troops at the border.
While senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said the condition of Indians stranded in Ukraine was worsening and accused the government of “not taking effective steps to bring them home”, his party colleagues Shashi Tharoor and Manish Tewari asked the government to scale up its efforts.
Targeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Rahul said he was missing. Leader of the Opposition in Rajya Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge said Modi's top priority should have been the 20,000 students, but he was focused on delivering speeches instead.“It is very clear that we have been caught napping as a country with such a large number of vulnerable civilians… 20,000 medical students and so on. We, arguably, should have made better preparations,” said Tharoor.
He said the US had been talking about the impending war for some weeks. “It was like a chronicle of a war foretold kind of situation and yet we are scrambling now to catch up… We have to now focus…
