'India is following a new norm under which no one sitting in Pakistan is allowed to believe that they can just walk across the border and kill our people', said Congress MP Shashi Tharoor while delivering remarks at the Indian Consulate in the United States on Saturday. Tharoor, who is leading the delegation to convey India's anti-terror stance, spoke in detail about the barbaric 22 April Pahalgam attack in Jammu and Kashmir in which 26 tourists were killed, including one Nepalese citizen.
In an interaction with a group of prominent members of the Indian-American community and individuals from leading media and think tanks, Tharoor said that India's message to Pakistan has been crystal clear, i.e. "We didn't want to start anything." He also listed the various terror attacks - from the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks to attacks in Uri and Pulwama - carried out in India by Pakistani terror outfits.
An all-party delegation of Indian Parliamentarians, led by Tharoor, also visited the 9/11 memorial here and paid homage to the victims of the terror attacks, expressing solidarity and underlining that the world has to be united in the fight against the “shared problem” of terrorism. He Tharoor said that the visit to the 9/11 Memorial was in a spirit of solidarity and was a “very moving moment for us”.
"It was a very moving moment for us, but it was also meant to send a very strong message that we are here in a city that is bearing still the scars of that savage terrorist attack in the wake of yet another terrorist attack in our own country. We came both as a reminder that this is a shared problem, but also out of a spirit of solidarity with the victims... It's a global problem, it's a scourge and we must all fight it unitedly", said Tharoor, adding, unlike the US, India has had to endure a “very much larger number of terrorist attacks."
"We were just sending a message to terrorists. You started, we replied. If you stop, we stop. And they stopped. There was an 88-hour war. We look back on that with a great deal of frustration because it needn’t have happened at all. Lives have been lost. But at the same time, we look back on this experience with a steely and renewed sense of determination. There is now got to be a new norm. No one sitting in Pakistan is going to be allowed to believe that they can just walk across the border and kill our citizens with impunity. There will be a price to pay and that price has been going up systematically. India is not interested, and we remain absolutely clear, we are not interested in warfare with Pakistan. We would much rather be left alone to grow our economy and put our people into the world” of the 21st century," Tharoor said.
“We have no desire to have anything that the Pakistanis have. Sadly, we may be a status quo power. They are not. They are a revisionist power. They covet territory that India controls, and they want to have it at any price. And if they can't get it through conventional means, they're willing to get it through terrorism. That is not acceptable to us, and that's really the message that we are here to give all of you in this country and elsewhere," he said.
Tharoor added that India is “determined now that there's got to be a new bottom line to this", adding that over the years, India has tried everything from giving international dossiers, and complaints to the sanctions committee, diplomacy.
"Everything has been tried. Pakistan has remained in denial. There has been absolutely no conviction, no prosecution of terrorists, no attempt to dismantle the terror infrastructure in that country, and the continued presence of safe havens. So from our point of view, this is it. You do this, you're going to get this back. And we have demonstrated with this operation that we can do it with a degree of precision and with a degree of restraint that the world, we hope, will understand. We have a right to self-defence. We've exercised that right. We have not done so irresponsibly…That's really the message I wanted to give you all today", Tharoor further cited.
Also Read: World will be against Pak: Dubey on all-party delegation to Saudi
Tharoor is leading a delegation of Indian parliamentarians to Guyana, Panama, Colombia, Brazil, and the US, conveying India's resolve against terrorism and emphasising Pakistan's links to terrorism. The multi-party delegations to different countries will underline that the recent conflict with Pakistan was triggered by the Pahalgam terror attack and not Operation Sindoor, as Islamabad claimed. The retaliatory Operation Sindoor launched by India, targeted terror infrastructure in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK). The delegation led by Tharoor includes Sarfaraz Ahmad (JMM), Ganti Harish Madhur Balayogi (TDP), Shashank Mani Tripathi (BJP), Bhubaneswar Kalita (BJP), Milind Deora (Shiv Sena), Tejasvi Surya (BJP), and India’s former Ambassador to the US Taranjit Sandhu. The delegation reached New York on Saturday and will travel to Guyana from here. It will return to the US on 3 June.
Follow us
