In US, Indian MP Tharoor blames Pakistan for conflict; seeks united stand against terror

"You (Pakistan) do this, you are going to get this back"...Read More

Congress MP, Shashi Tharoor, who is leading an all-party parliamentary delegation to the United States as part of diplomatic offensive to present India’s case for military attacks inside Pakistan, blamed Islamabad for inaction against terrorist outfits and sought to justify India’s position as self-defense.

“We are determined now that there’s got to be a new bottom line to this,” Tharoor said at the Indian Consulate in New York.

He was speaking about the 88-hour long conflict between India and Pakistan between May 7 and 10, triggered by April 22 militant attack in Pahalgam area of the Indian-controlled Kashmir.

New Delhi had quickly pointed finger at Pakistan for the attack, which killed 26 Indian tourists. Pakistan firmly denied the allegations and responded to Indian aerial strikes on its territory with its own operation.

On May 10, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that his team had arbitrated a ceasefire agreement between the two nuclear-armed South Asian neighbors. Later, Trump said, he had saved millions of lives by averting a nuclear catastrophe between India and Pakistan.

In his remarks Saturday evening, Shashi Tharoor, a former Under Secretary General of the United Nations, favored New Delhi’s new military approach toward dealing with Pakistan.

 “We have tried everything, international dossier, complaints….. everything has been tried. Pakistan has remained in denial. There has been absolutely no conviction, no serious criminal prosecution, no attempt to dismantle the terror infrastructure in that country, and the persistence of safe havens.”

The Opposition MP voiced his strong support for Operation Sindoor, launched under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rightwing BJP Government, saying it precisely hit terrorist hideouts in Pakistan.

“You (Pakistan) do this, you are going to get this back and we have demonstrated with this Operation (Operation Sindoor) that we can do it with a degree of precision,” he said, claiming that the strikes took place on nine specific known terrorist bases, headquarters, and launchpads in Pakistan.

Islamabad said the Indian strikes killed civilians including women and children and destroyed mosques. Pakistan has also blamed India for stoking insurgency in Balochistan and sponsoring terror attacks in the country through it proxies that including Balochistan Liberation Army and Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. Both are banned terrorist outfits.

Pakistan military said it shot down several Indian fighter jets including state-of-the-art French Rafales. New Delhi has not officially confirmed the number of warplanes it lost but international media and Rafale company have confirmed the losses in various numbers.

Indian officials say Resistance Front is linked to terrorist group Laskhar-e-Taiba, a group Pakistan has banned.

Tharoor told the audience that Pakistan chose to follow its usual path of denial after a group Resistance Front claimed responsibility for the attack.

He said India will respond to any future terrorist attack with a military action in self-defense.

“We are not going to confine ourselves only to listings, to diplomacy, to the production of international dossiers. We are also going to exercise our right to self-defense, which every country recognizes.”

Tharoor and other members of the delegation the delegation earlier visited the 9/11 Memorial in New York after which he expressed solidarity with the victims of the terrorist attack that happened in 2001.

While drawing parallels between the American and Indian experiences he sought a common stand against terror.

“We ourselves in India have been subject to the same wounds that you are seeing the scars of today in this very moving memorial. We came both as a reminder that this is a shared problem, but also out of a spirit of solidarity with the victims, who included Indians… It is a global problem, and we must fight it unitedly.”

The delegation is set to travel to Guyana, Panama, Brazil, and Colombia as part of the diplomatic mission and will be back in the U.S. on June 3 when Congress returns to session in Washington D.C.

Categories
CounterterrorismKashmir CrisisPahalgamPakistan-India conflictTerrorismUS-Pakistan-India

Ali Imran is a Washington-based writer. author and poet.
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