Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor's criticism on India's new visa rules has triggered a strong reaction from the government.
External Affairs Minister S M Krishna has said his ministry was with the Home Ministry on the issue of new visa rules. On his deputy Shashi Tharoor's tweets Krishna said policy changes should not be discussed in public.
The External Affairs Minister said: "Policy matters should not be discussed in the public domain."
Top sources have told NDTV that no country has objected to India's new
rules and they took on the minister of state for external affairs head
on.
Yesterday Tharoor had controversially tweeted, are the rules ... "worth it just in hope of making it difficult for a future Headley to recce? Are we going to allow terrorists to make us less welcoming?"
"Making it more difficult to visit India, return here frequently or stay long hurts large numbers of innocents, costs us millions of $..."
Today, government sources picked on this point and revealed that the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) and Intelligence Bureau (IB) are interrogating an American Headley had met and that this American has been staying in India on a tourist visa for 9 years. Exactly the sort of thing the new rules want to prevent now.
(Read: Headley case provokes debate over visa rules)Recently, India announced that it was introducing stricter new rules for foreigners spending lengthy periods of time in India. Foreigners now have to leave the country every 180 days and spend at least two months outside India if they want to return.
The US has expressed its concern over whether these new guidelines will adversely affect American tourists to India.
However, Tharoor re-tweeted his comments and has posted some tweets of support from other people on his site such as:
@raheelk About time to stop manufacturing controversies around tweets of Shashi Tharoor. He's just trying to make democracy accessible.
@virsanghvi If Shashi Tharoor said same things to journos, he would be hailed as frank. When he tweets, he is called irresponsible.
