'They've failed for 30 yrs, they'll fail...': Shashi Tharoor says India wants nothing to do with 'bigoted' Pakistan

Congress MP Shashi Tharoor criticised Pakistan as a “failed, bigoted” power that has been harbouring terrorists for years. He said India wants nothing to do with Pakistan, India is focused on progressing and growing its economy and does not want to concern itself with a revisionist power like Pakistan. 

Speaking with Al Arabiya English, Tharoor called Pakistan ‘a master of denial’ that claimed to have nothing to do with the 26/11 Mumbai attacks till one of the terrorists was caught alive and then admitted he came from across the border. They also claimed to have no knowledge of 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden till he was found hiding inside the country not far away from a Pakistani army base.

“This is the Pakistani route – it's constantly ‘show us the evidence’. Well, I mean the fact is there is enough circumstantial evidence and there are intelligence intercepts on the basis of which India is acting and India has absolutely no other reason to do this,” he said.

“Let's understand something very clearly. India is a status quo power. It wants nothing that Pakistan has. It is focused on growing its economy, improving its high technology, and providing a future for its young people. It is entirely happy to be left alone by Pakistan and it'll leave Pakistan alone. Pakistan is a revisionist power. It claims territory India holds. It is a bigoted power that wishes to take over parts of India on the grounds that the people living there happen to share the same religion as the Pakistanis. Well, there are 200 million Indian Muslims who share the same religion as the Pakistanis. Do they want to take them all over? It's a preposterous approach that the Pakistanis have been adopting,” he said.

“They have failed for 30 years. They're going to fail for another 30. And the sad sad lesson that they must learn and have failed to learn is that terrorism is not the answer. Killing innocent civilians will invite reprisals and we are scaling up the reprisals with each outrage,” said Tharoor.

Tharoor said, India has no interest in a war with Pakistan. “All India wanted to do was to make it very clear that people from Pakistan can't just come across the border, kill innocent civilians who are just enjoying a tourist holiday and walk back across without having to pay a price for it. So all India did was react in self-defence to a terrorist outrage.” He added that the response was measured and calibrated and undertaken at night, when civilians were not likely to be wandering about. “Pakistan chose to overreact,” he added.

Tharoor said India was not escalating, it was merely reacting. “If Pakistan chooses to stop its unnecessary provocations, India will not act. I'm quite sure about that. There is no proactive military engagement coming from the Indian side beyond the attacks in reprisal to the terrorism. Nothing at all,” he asserted. 

Speaking about the locations that India hit after the Pahalgam terror attack, Tharoor said those nine locations were extremely well-known terror bases, and served terror groups like Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba. “These are not innocent places. If there were sadly any civilians staying there, there were families of terrorist leaders or those training to be terrorists. I'm really sorry to say this because we have absolutely no interest in behaving like terrorists and killing civilians.” He said terrorists were “trained, financed, equipped and dispatched to kill innocent civilians in India” in the locations India hit.

The Congress MP also took to explaining the importance of the name ‘Operation Sindoor’. After explaining the concept of sindoor, Tharoor said, “A terrorist attack had wiped the sindoor off their forehead because only married women wear it. It was a very emotive term to remind people of what had happened and why this action was necessary... I might add that at the end of that there is also undoubtedly the evocative thought that the colour of the sindoor is not that different from the colour of blood and that was what was spilt by the terrorists in our country. I thought it was a very, very evocative, emotional and powerful choice to name the operation that way.”