External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Tuesday said that India is not going to yield to nuclear blackmail, stating that New Delhi will no longer accept that terrorists are proxies and spare the government that supports and finances them. He said terrorists will be treated with “no impunity” and India will do what needs to be done to defend its people.
“We are not going to yield to nuclear blackmail that you know there could be escalation, and therefore we should not do anything,” Jaishankar said in an interview to Newsweek in Manhattan.
The External Affairs minister’s remarks come nearly two months after the April 22 terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam in which 26 people were killed.
Jaishankar called it an “act of warfare” aimed at destroying tourism in Kashmir, which he said was the mainstay of the economy. He stated that India, after the Pahalgam attack, decided that it could not allow terrorists to function with impunity.
In his Newsweek interview, Jaishankar stated that India’s message to the world is that there should be zero tolerance for terrorism and there should be no circumstances under which terrorists’ acts should be allowed, supported or financed. He said that India has been a victim of terrorism for the past four decades, and recalled various terrorist attacks, like the 26/11 Mumbai attack and the Parliament attack.
Asked about India’s message to global powers and international institutions on cross-border terrorism emanating from Pakistan, he said, “This morning, I was at an exhibition on terrorism at the United Nations, and this was something which our embassy, our mission to the UN, had organised and the reason we did that, we had a number of ambassadors from other countries who were there as well is because we believe that terrorism is actually a threat to everybody, that no country should use it as an instrument to further its policies because at the end of the day it comes back to bite everyone.”
“If we take the view that one terrorist act or one terrorist organization or one sponsor of terrorism is justified here or you give them a free pass or you underplay it, it can easily happen, in fact, it does happen in other situations. The message to the world has to be that there should be zero tolerance for terrorism, that there should be no circumstances, no excuse, no justification, under which you would allow, support, finance, sponsor terrorist acts.”
“Now in our particular case, we’ve unfortunately had an experience of this. The experience has been very very intense for the last four decades but actually started from the time of our independence. If you see within a few months of our independence, terrorists were sent into Kashmir again with this idea that they are proxies and they are tribal invaders and then soon enough the Pakistani army followed,” Jaishankar said.
“We have battled terrorism really intensively for the last four decades and and we’ve had some horrific cases. Everybody would remember the Mumbai attack and where really a major global metropolis was for a few days really sort of brought to a standstill with attacks on a scale which could not be contemplated and with particularly targeted foreigners especially of this country. And we’ve had an attack on our parliament, our parliament meeting in session, with the intent of taking lawmakers and the people governing India hostage at that time. That it was foiled was a different matter but do look at the dangerous intent and the risks inherent in this,” the External Affairs Minister said.
He said, “We have had a string of these attacks and we’ve now reached a point, and I think in many ways the Pahalgam terrorist attack on April 22nd, this sentiment in India that look enough is enough that we are because you know the Pahalgam was meant, I mean it was an act of economic warfare. It was meant to destroy tourism in Kashmir which was the mainstay of the economy. It was also meant to provoke religious violence because people were asked to identify their faith before they were killed. We decided that we cannot let terrorists function with impunity, the idea that they’re on that side of the border and that therefore sort of prevents retribution, I think is a proposition that needs to be challenged and that is what we did.”
“So, now bear in mind these are not people you know who operate in secret, I mean these are terrorist organizations who have the equivalent of the corporate headquarters in the populated towns of Pakistan everybody knows what what is the headquarters of organization A and organization B and those are actually the buildings, the headquarters that we destroyed,” he told Newsweek.
Emphasising India’s stance on dealing with terrorism, Jaishankar said, “We are very clear, there will be no impunity for terrorists that we will not deal with them any longer as proxies and spare the government which supports and finances and in many ways motivates them.”
Jaishankar emphasized that India will not be deterred by the threat of nuclear weapons when it comes to responding to cross-border attacks.
“We will not allow nuclear blackmail to prevent us from responding because we’ve also heard this for too long that you know you are both nuclear countries therefore the other guy will come and do horrible things but you mustn’t do anything because it gets the world worried. Now we’re not going to fall for that you know if he’s going to come and do things we are going to go there and also you know hit the people who did this. So, no yielding to nuclear blackmail, no impunity to terrorists, no more free pass that they are proxies and we will do what we have to do to defend our people,” Jaishankar said.
On April 22, terrorists attacked tourists at the Baisaran meadow in Pahalgam and killed 25 Indian nationals and one from Nepal, leaving several others injured.
In response to the Pahalgam attack, the Indian Armed Forces carried out targeted strikes against terror infrastructure in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir, resulting in the deaths of over 100 terrorists linked to groups such as Jaish-e-Mohammed, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and Hizbul Mujahideen.
On April 24, India also announced a series of measures against Pakistan, including the suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty, the shutdown of the only operational land border crossing at Attari and the downgrading of diplomatic ties.
Meanwhile, before arriving in Washington, DC on Tuesday (local time), Jaishankar was in New York, where he inaugurated an exhibition at the United Nations on ‘The Human Cost of Terrorism,’ highlighting the need to expose state sponsorship of terrorism. (ANI)
