World must display zero tolerance towards terrorism: Jaishankar in US
Says Pahalgam attack was act of economic warfare
Washington/ New York: The victims and perpetrators of terrorism must never be equated and India has every right to defend its people against terror strikes, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said on Tuesday.
With his counterparts from the US, Australia and Japan listening, Jaishankar also said that India expects its Quad partners to understand and appreciate its position on dealing with terrorism.
Jaishankar made the remarks to the media ahead of a crucial meeting of the foreign ministers of the Quad grouping hosted by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
“The world must display zero tolerance (towards terrorism). Victims and perpetrators must never be equated and India has every right to defend its people against terrorism,” Jaishankar said.
“And we will exercise that right. We expect our Quad partners to understand and appreciate that,” he said.
The external affairs minister also underlined the need to ensure freedom of choice for countries in the Indo-Pacific region.
The Quad, comprising India, the US, Australia and Japan, has emerged as a key grouping largely focusing on peace, security and stability in the Indo-Pacific region.
The Quad foreign ministerial meeting is expected to prepare ground for the grouping’s annual summit in New Delhi later this year.
“It is essential that nations of the Indo-Pacific have the freedom of choice so essential to make right decisions on development and security,” he said.
“In the last several months, we have made significant progress in Quad initiatives. They include in the maritime domain, logistics, education and political coordination. We will be discussing that in greater detail,” he said.
Jaishankar said the working of the Quad has been made more efficient.
“A more cohesive, nimble and focused Quad will certainly help deliver better. Quad is about deepening our convergence and expanding our common ground. I value our consultations on different dimensions of the Indo-Pacific in that regard,” he added.
The minister said India plans to host the next Quad summit and it has some proposals on how to make it productive.
Jaishankar is visiting the US from June 30 to July 2 at the invitation of Rubio.
Earlier, S Jaishankar said that the Pahalgam terror attack was an act of economic warfare meant to destroy tourism in Kashmir, asserting that India has made it clear that it will not allow nuclear blackmail to prevent it from responding to terror emanating from Pakistan.
India has had a string of terrorist attacks over the years emanating from Pakistan and in the wake of the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack, there was a sentiment in the country that “enough is enough,” Jaishankar said on Monday.
His remarks came during a conversation with Newsweek CEO Dev Pragad hosted at the publication’s headquarters at One World Trade Centre near the 9/11 Memorial in Manhattan.
Jaishankar said that the Pahalgam attack “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.”
“So we decided that we cannot let terrorists function with impunity. The idea that they are on that side of the border, and that, therefore, sort of prevents retribution, I think, that’s a proposition that needs to be challenged and that is what we did,” he said.
He said that the terrorists based in Pakistan carrying out attacks against India do not operate in secret and these are terrorist organisations who have the “equivalent of their corporate headquarters in the populated towns of Pakistan.”
“Everybody knows what is the headquarters of organisation A and organisation B and those are the buildings, the headquarters that India destroyed” in Operation Sindoor, he said.
Operation Sindoor was launched to target terror infrastructure in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir in retaliation for the Pahalgam attack that killed 26 civilians and for which The Resistance Front (TRF), a front for Pakistan-based terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) had claimed responsibility.
“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. We will not allow nuclear blackmail to prevent us from responding,” he said.
Jaishankar added that “we’ve also heard this for too long” that both India and Pakistan are nuclear countries and “therefore the other guy will come and do horrible things, but you mustn’t do anything because it gets the world worried.
“Now we are not going to fall for that. If he is going to come and do things, we are going to go there and also 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 amid applause from the audience.
Referring to the exhibition at the UN highlighting the devastating toll of terrorist attacks across the globe, including those perpetrated by Pakistan-based terror entities, Jaishankar said India believes that “terrorism is actually a threat to everyone, 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.”
