Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan had a perfect reply for an Indian journalist who tried to embarrass him by asking and old clichéd question: “Can terrorism and talks go hand in hand?”
This is the typical question Indian journalists are fond of asking the Pakistani leadership in line with the Modi government’s anti-Pakistan policy.
“Imran Sahib, just answer a small question,” the journalist associated with India’s Asian News International (ANI) agency, asked the Pakistani prime minister as he was leaving after addressing a conference on Central and South Asian countries in Tashkent.
“Can talks and terrorism go together? This is a simple question for you from India,” asked the unidentified journalist.
Prime Minister Khan however took the Indian journalist head-on and said, “We have communicated to India that we have been waiting for so long to coexist as civilised neighbours. But what can we do when this RSS ideology has come in the way?”
#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
As the prime minister and his entourage turned to leave, the journalist started hounding PM Khan, shouting his name in an attempt to get another question in.
As the prime minister’s security detail moved to keep the journalist away, Pakistani Interior Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed could be heard saying, “Hatt na yar (move away, man)!”
The low-rated news agency later shared the video of its reporter’s encounter with PM Khan on their Twitter account and claimed the Pakistani prime minister ‘evaded’ the question about Islamabad’s control over the Taliban.
However, the tweet wasn’t received well across the border either, with Twitter user Ammad Ansari wondering when would the Indian news channels — often referred to as the ‘Godi Media’ for their tendency to ‘sit in the lap’ of the Narendra Modi government —gather courage to grill Indian ministers in the same way.
However, it was another user, Shahzad Khan, who took the cake with his Bollywood-themed comeback to ANI’s chest-thumping.
It is worth mentioning that ANI had featured prominently in the EU Disinfo Lab’s groundbreaking revelations in December 2020 regarding worldwide disinformation networks run by actors associated with the Indian government to malign Pakistan.
ANI, in particular, had ‘amplified’ fake news and disinformation forwarded to it by fake platforms in a bid to tarnish Pakistan’s image over the course of a 15-year campaign run by the Srivastava Group, which works to advance New Delhi’s interests through shadowy means.
