Renu­ka Singh

For­eign Af­fairs Min­is­ter Dr Amery Browne yes­ter­day said “di­a­logue and diplo­ma­cy are the tools of our trade.” His com­ment fol­lowed me­dia re­ports that In­di­an High Com­mis­sion­er Arun Ku­mar Sahu had fired back at the Gov­ern­ment for say­ing that he was re­spon­si­ble for the lack of do­nat­ed vac­cines from In­dia.

“I have not­ed quotes in sev­er­al news­pa­pers at­trib­uted to the cur­rent High Com­mis­sion­er of the Re­pub­lic of In­dia which ex­press pub­lic crit­i­cism of the Prime Min­is­ter of the Re­pub­lic of Trinidad and To­ba­go,” Browne said.

“There were al­so pub­lished claims at­trib­uted to His Ex­cel­len­cy the High Com­mis­sion­er which ref­er­enced a view that the Prime Min­is­ter had en­gaged in “per­son­al at­tacks” against him. How­ev­er there was no ev­i­dence in the ar­ti­cles of any such at­tacks. It is in the in­ter­est of both na­tions to pre­vent any such ten­sions from grow­ing.” he said.

Browne said di­a­logue and diplo­ma­cy of­fers the po­ten­tial to “bring us clos­er to­geth­er even than be­fore, and have been suc­cess­ful­ly de­ployed to re­solve dif­fer­ences far greater than the ones that cur­rent­ly con­front us”.

He added: “I have al­ways main­tained good com­mu­ni­ca­tion with High Com­mis­sion­er Ku­mar Sahu, and up to Fri­day March 19 reached out and made mul­ti­ple at­tempts to en­gage in fur­ther di­a­logue to help re­solve the sit­u­a­tion.”

Guardian Me­dia re­port­ed that Sahu was un­avail­able for that call from Browne and the two have not spo­ken. Sahu on Fri­day said he had not spo­ken to Browne on the vac­cine is­sue.

“I have since tak­en ad­di­tion­al mea­sures to­ward a di­a­logue with the ob­jec­tive of achiev­ing a res­o­lu­tion in the short­est pos­si­ble time,” Browne said.

A res­o­lu­tion has be­come nec­es­sary as both men blamed the oth­er for mis­in­for­ma­tion about the 500,000 vac­cines do­nat­ed by In­dia for Cari­com.

Row­ley told Guardian Me­dia on Fri­day that a dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion was “cre­at­ed by the be­hav­iour of the High Com­mis­sion­er”.

He said the sit­u­a­tion was not helped by the ap­petite for and pro­lif­er­a­tion of mis­in­for­ma­tion fed to the me­dia in fur­ther­ance of the many and var­ied agen­das.

Sahu, al­so on Fri­day, said a Gov­ern­ment should not at­tack a High Com­mis­sion­er.