Thread by @surajitdasgupta

Hardeep Singh Puri did not slip up. If he had, he would have deleted his tweet about Rohingyas. Those two tweets are still there.

#Rohingya

Thread begins…

Both Puri's assertion and the MHA clarification are correct. The MHA used the adjective "illegal" before refugees, who it said would not be given state privileges but instead be kept in detention centres until their deportation, which implies…

… that there are legal #Rohingya refugees too, whom Puri's tweets had referred to — without his feeling the need to precede the word "refugee" with "legal".

However, there is a problem. India is not a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention of 1951. So…

… no #Rohingya can legally stay in India. Where Puri was wrong was in dabbling with the issue, which should have been left unaddressed if India does not have the stomach to stir up the politically correct comity of nations and say bluntly it will never shelter these people…

… The union minister tried to make the Narendra Modi government look good to leftists/Islamists. He said indeed that those who feared that the government would enforce the CAA should take heart from the fact that these #Rohingyas were being accommodated…

… It's one of the innumerable instances where some government or Sangh functionary (PM's exhortation to follow Mohammed, Sarsanghchalak's DNA theory, referring to SriRama as "Imam-e-Hind" etc) decided to speak on a matter where silence would have been a more judicious option…

… Because those that the Modi government is trying to please — communists and Muslims — will never be pleased whereas a section of its core constituency of political-religious Hindus gets alienated due to such statements. This section is constantly growing…

… The sizable Hindu opponents of the regime can no longer be wished away with the conspiracy theory that the opposition has planted them. Modi is walking the dangerously slippery Vajpayee Road, which led to the fall of the otherwise great previous PM from the BJP.

Thread ends.