A slip or a snub?

The U.S. Ambassador ‘forgets’ to congratulate Sunita Narain with others

April 25, 2016 12:00 am | Updated 01:26 pm IST

de25 tweet

de25 tweet

The United States Ambassador to India, Richard Verma, had to apologise to environmentalist Sunita Narain on Sunday, hours after she pointed out that the former had left her out of a tweet congratulating Indians named in the TIME 100 most influential list.

Dr. Narain, who is the director-general of the Centre for Science and Environment, was one of the six Indians included the magazine’s list that came out last week.

She was included in the category of “pioneers” among the 100 for her work to clean Delhi’s air and activism on climate change.

In a tweet posted on April 22, Mr. Verma (@USAmdIndia) congratulated the rest of the Indians on the list — actor Priyanka Chopra, tennis star Sania Mirza, Flipkart entrepreneurs and founders Binny and Sachin Bansal and Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan as, besides Indian-origin Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

On Sunday morning, Dr. Narain tweeted back to the Ambassador saying that she hoped she had not been “deliberately” left out because of her “inconvenient” views on climate change. Speaking to The Hindu later, she said she was referring to the CSE’s critique of certain U.S. policies.

The CSE had published a report titled “Capitan America” in October 2015 that termed the U.S. approach to climate change as “business as usual”.

Meanwhile, on Sunday evening Mr. Verma tweeted back to Dr. Narain, apologising and saying that the list in the earlier tweet was not meant to be complete. He then went on to congratulate her for her recognition.

However, Dr. Narain said she wasn’t buying that.

“If the list was not meant to be complete, how come I was the only one to be left out? It’s very strange. It cannot be a slip. The Ambassador either does not recognise us [CSE] or doesn’t want to recognise us,” she added.

She added that the CSE stood for ideas that usually didn’t get recognised and was grateful for TIME for recognising the work done by the organisation.

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