Senior Congress leader Jairam Ramesh posted a video of former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee on Friday, the death anniversary of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, with a stinging jab at what he implied was Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s foreign policy failure over Operation Sindoor, the missile strikes on terrorist camps in Pakistan and Pakistan occupied Kashmir.

The video features Vajpayee narrating how he was unable to go to the US for treatment of his kidney ailment due to financial constraints.

“Somehow Rajivji came to know about that. He called me. He decided to include me in the delegation to the United Nations. I became a full-fledged member. All medical expenses were paid by the government. I came back fully recovered,” Vajpayee says in the video.

Ramesh said Rajiv’s magnanimity is “absent in Mr Modi.”

“Since the 1950s, MPs from various political parties would be sent in delegations to the UN in New York every Oct-Nov. Mr. Narendra Modi stopped this tradition from 2014. But now that he is desperate and his image globally has been shattered, he suddenly thought of such all-party delegations of MPs to visit different countries to divert attention from the tough questions he is being called to answer,” Ramesh wrote.

“Today we mark the 34 death anniversary of Rajiv Gandhi. The essential humanity, goodness, and decency of the man--qualities absent in Mr. Modi---come out poignantly in this story narrated by none other than his political adversary Atal Bihari Vajpayee,” he added.

After Opposition leaders from the INDIA bloc condemned the NDA government’s selecting representatives on its own for its Operation Sindoor delegations, the Centre included names of some of the Opposition leaders suggested by the parties themselves, like Abhishek Banerjee of the Trinamool.

Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated on May 21, 1991 by a woman suicide bomber when he was campaigning at Sriperumbudur, a village around 40 km from Madras, for the Lok Sabha Congress candidate.