New York: “India hit hard and smart,” Congress MP Shashi Tharoor said on Saturday, while highlighting how India responded in a measured and calibrated manner following the dastardly Pahalgam terror attack.
“I don’t work for the government, as you know. I work for an opposition party, but I myself authored an op-ed in one of India’s leading papers, within a couple of days (of the Pahalgam attack), saying that the time had come to hit hard and hit smart and I’m pleased to say that’s exactly what India did,” Tharoor said during an interaction at the Indian Consulate in New York.
He was all praise for Operation Sindoor, which was launched to strike terror facilities in Pakistan and Pakistan-Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK), as he stressed India’s message that it was no longer going to take terror lying down.
Speaking on how India targeted only terror facilities in Pakistan and PoJK and not military or government establishments, the Thiruvananthapuram MP said: “These included those of the Lashkar-e-Taiba in Muridke and the Jaish-e-Mohammad’s set-up in Bahawalpur. The Jaish is responsible, among other things, for the murder of journalist Daniel Pearl.”
“India sent a clear message that it was not going to take terror lying down, it would answer, but equally that by delivering very precisely, calculated, calibrated strikes on very specific targets, it was also sending a message that this was not meant to be the opening salvo in a protracted war but just an act of retribution, that we were prepared to stop with that act,” he said.
Tharoor also spoke on how the time has come to set a “new bottom line” in India’s dealings with Pakistan. “We have tried everything – international dossiers, complaints, everything has been tried,” he added.
He referred to how Pakistan has taken no steps against terrorism. “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…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,” Tharoor said.
He made it clear that India did not seek war with Pakistan, and has demonstrated its ability to strike with a “degree of precision”. “We are not interested in warfare. We would much rather be left alone to grow our economy and pull our people into the world they are getting ready for in the 21st century,” Tharoor said on the day India became the world’s fourth largest economy. .
“We came both as a reminder that this (terrorism) 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,” he said.
Tharoor is leading the Indian delegation that visited the US to share the country’s views on Operation Sindoor. The delegation will also visit Panama, Guyana, Brazil, and Colombia.
