'Compulsive hostility': Govt rejects Washington Post's Maldives report

India on Friday strongly trashed two recent reports published by the Washington Post -- one linking New Delhi to a failed plot to impeach Maldivian President Mohamed Muizzu and another on Indian agents allegedly attempting to eliminate certain terror elements in Pakistan.

Dismissing the reports, Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said the newspaper and the reporter in question appear to nurse a "compulsive hostility" towards India. 

In its report on the Maldives, the Post, citing a document titled "Democratic Renewal Initiative", claimed that opposition politicians proposed bribing 40 members of Parliament, including those from Muizzu's own party, to vote to impeach him. After months of secret talks, the plotters failed to gather enough votes to impeach the president, it said.

"Both the newspaper and the reporter in question appear to nurse a compulsive hostility towards India. You can see a pattern in their activities. I leave you to judge their credibility. As far as we are concerned, they have none," Jaiswal said.

"As regards (the report on) Pakistan, I remind you of what Hillary Clinton said -- 'You cannot keep snakes in your backyard and expect them only to bite your neighbours,'" he said.

Clinton had made the comments in a blunt message to Pakistan in 2011, when she was serving as the US secretary of state.

She had also said that Washington intended to "push the Pakistanis very hard" to remove militant safe havens and tackle groups like the Haqqani network that are responsible for cross-border strikes.

In its report on India's "shadow" operations in Pakistan, the Washington Post, quoting unnamed Pakistani and western officials, claimed that the Indian intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), is carrying out a programme since 2021 to "kill at least a half a dozen people" inside Pakistan.