NEW DELHI: Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesperson Shehzad Poonawalla on Tuesday took a dig at the Congress amid disquiet within the grand old party over statements by its leaders who are members of the multi-party delegations for India’s diplomatic outreach post Operation Sindoor.Poonawalla said that top Congress leaders Rahul Gandhi, Revanth Reddy and Jairam Ramesh, whom he dubbed as “RRR”, have received an “SMS”, referring to Shashi Tharoor, Manish Tewari and Salman Khurshid.“Today, ‘RRR’ – Revanth, Ramesh and Rahul – got an ‘SMS’…SMS means messages from Salman Khurshid, Manish Tewari and Shashi Tharoor. After Tewari and Tharoor, now Khurshid has shown a mirror to RRR to not side with Pakistan. Don’t put the (Gandhi) family and party ahead of the nation,” Poonawalla, a former Congress member himself, told news agency ANI.“It’s unfortunate that on the one hand, our MPs are exposing Pakistan on foreign soil, while ‘RRR’ call Operation Sindoor a failure. They say that these MPs are roaming freely, just like (Pahalgam) terrorists…It’s unfortunate that RRR wants to amplify Pakistan’s narrative. After this tight slap from ‘SMS’, ‘RRR’ should stop supporting Pakistan,” he added.Also Read | ‘MPs roaming, terrorists also roaming’: Jairam Ramesh sparks row; BJP says Congress ‘crossed all limit’Poonawalla’s remarks come a day after ex-foreign minister Khurshid, in a cryptic social media post, slammed “people at home” for “calculating political allegiances” after he backed the August 2019 abrogation of Article 370 by the Narendra Modi government.However, the most discomforting comments for the Congress, have come from Tharoor, who is heading one of the seven all-party delegations. The Thiruvananthapuram MP, a former diplomat, has made statements which have been seen by a large section of his party as being in “favour” the government, triggering a backlash.
