New Delhi: Congress MP Shashi Tharoor on Sunday acknowledged the possible intelligence failure in the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack, but cautioned against rushing to assign blame.
“No country can ever have a foolproof 100 per cent intelligence. We will never know about the various terror attacks that were successfully thwarted. We only get to know about the ones that we failed to thwart. This is normal in any nation. There were failures, I agree, but that should not be our main focus right now,” he told ANI in an apparent defence of the NDA government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
To drive his point home, Tharoor compared India’s situation to the October 7, 2023 strike by Hamas on Israel despite its strong intel. “We have got the example of Israel, the world’s best intelligence services according to everybody, which was taken by surprise on October 7, just two years ago. It seems to me, just as Israel is waiting till the end of the war before they demand accountability, similarly, I think we too should see the present crisis through and then demand accountability from the government,” he said.
He also rejected Pakistan’s offer for a neutral probe, emphasising that the neighbouring country should not be involved in investigating the attack given its history of denying responsibility for similar incidents in the past. “Personally, I would have had no interest in Pakistan’s participation in any investigation. You do not ask a murderer to investigate his murders,” he said, in response to Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s offer for a ‘neutral’ probe into the Pahalgam terror attack, which claimed 26 lives.
He called the Indus Waters Treaty “more of a symbolic gesture at this point. “…When the government wants to send a strong signal that normal relations are no longer possible, ordinary human beings inevitably become the victims…,” he added, highlighting the “human cost of people being forced to go back.”
He further asserted that all of India is united and waiting for a fitting reply to Pakistan.
The Congress MP also termed Pakistan People’s Party Chairperson Bilawal Bhutto’s threatening remark over India’s suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty as inflammatory rhetoric. “…. The Pakistanis have to understand that they simply can not kill Indians with impunity… We have no designs on Pakistan. But if they do something, they must be prepared for a response. If blood is going to flow, it will flow possibly more on their side than ours,” he said, reaffirming India’s stance on national security.
Meanwhile, Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah clarified his “no need for war” remarks amid backlash from the BJP. “I never said there should be no war with Pakistan, if a war is inevitable, it will happen. I only said war shouldn’t happen right away,” he explained.
In a post on X, he said war should be the last resort for any country. “It is now clear to both the people of the country and the central government that the terror attack in Pahalgam, orchestrated by Pakistan-backed terrorists, was due to a failure in our intelligence and security systems. The central government has the responsibility to first rectify this lapse and take necessary precautions to ensure that such incidents do not occur in the future,” he wrote.
I have observed the debates and discussions, both for and against, surrounding the statement I made about war.
War should always be a nation’s last resort — never the first, nor the only option. Only when every other means to defeat the enemy has failed, should a country be…
— Siddaramaiah (@siddaramaiah) April 27, 2025
He, however, warned against some miscreants spreading war hysteria and disrupting communal harmony. “Pakistan today is a bankrupt, diseased nation with nothing to lose. That is exactly why India, which is emerging as a powerful global nation, must tread carefully,” he added.
