Diplomacy cannot be reduced to appeasement, nor can it be conducted through public posturing designed for domestic political consumption, BJP sources appeared to deliver a lesson in diplomacy as they criticised Sonia Gandhi's article which questioned the government's "silence" on the killing of Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was assassinated in a joint US-Israeli airstrike on Saturday morning. "Sonia Gandhi's recent article attempts to portray India's calibrated response to the ongoing West Asian crisis as silence. That characterisation is not only misleading, it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how responsible diplomacy works," BJP sources told NDTV.