The Government of India on Tuesday summoned British High Commissioner Alexander Ellis and conveyed its strong opposition to the “unwarranted” and “tendentious” discussion on the three new farm laws in the British Parliament.
The government’s reaction comes after a group of around dozen cross-party British MPs debated issues around the farmers’ protest in India in the British Parliament based on an e-petition. The MPs questioned the Indian government’s alleged “use of force” against farmers protesting against the new farm laws and journalists being “targeted” while covering the protests.
In a statement, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said, “Foreign Secretary summoned the British High Commissioner and conveyed strong opposition to the unwarranted and tendentious discussion on agricultural reforms in India in the British Parliament.”
At Tuesday’s meeting India’s foreign secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla told Alexander Ellis, who was appointed as envoy earlier this year, the debate “represented a gross interference in the politics of another democratic country,” according to the MEA statement.
“He advised that British MPs should refrain from practising vote-bank politics by misrepresenting events, especially in relation to another fellow democracy,” it added, in an apparent reference to British lawmakers and voters of Indian descent.
Earlier in the day, the High Commission of India in London slammed the debate as “false assertions” in a “distinctly one-sided discussion”.
“We deeply regret that rather than a balanced debate, false assertions—without substantiation or facts—were made, casting aspersions on the largest functioning democracy in the world and its institutions,” the commission said in a statement after the Monday evening debate on an e-petition.
The debate was held in response to an e-petition which had crossed the 100,000-signature threshold, required for it to be approved by the House of Commons Petitions Committee. The Indian High Commission made its displeasure known despite the British government earlier reiterating that the three farm laws were a “domestic matter”.