'Whose fault is that?': Shashi Tharoor responds to Pakistan's 'victims of terrorism' claim, flags Hillary Clinton's 'breed vipers' warning

Congress MP Shashi Tharoor attacked Pakistan for supporting terrorism and said that Islamabad has nobody to blame but itself. He invoked former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's warning about "breeding vipers in your backyard". Tharoor is leading a multi-party delegation on behalf of India in the US. 

He was responding to the claims of the Pakistani delegation led by Bilawal Bhutto Zardari that Islamabad is also a victim of terrorism. 

Speaking at the Indian embassy in Washington, the Congress MP said: “This (Pakistan) delegation is going around saying we are also victims of terrorism, we have lost more lives to terrorism than India has. We turn around and say—whose fault is that?”

“As Hillary Clinton famously said 10 years ago, ‘You can't breed vipers in your backyard and expect them to bite only your neighbours," he added. 

He further mentioned that Pakistan is now facing attacks from the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a group that broke away from the Taliban and went on to ask who created the Taliban from which the TTP broke off. 

“We all know the answer to that, so let Pakistan look inside it and let it do some serious interior reflection before it goes around pleading innocence and deniability and everything else,” Tharoor stated.

Moreover, he said that Operation Sindoor is a brilliantly chosen name for India's precision strikes against Pakistan following the Pahalgam terror attack, which killed 26 people. His remarks came while speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. 

Tharoor said that terrorists shot men in front of their wives and children but spared the women. He said that one of the women was told to go back and tell what the terrorists did. 

"Operation Sindoor was a brilliantly chosen name. We were very conscious that these brutal terrorists, who by the way, shot men in front of their wives and children, but spared the women. And when the one wife screamed out 'kill me too,' she was told: 'No, you go back and tell them what we've done'," Tharoor said. 

He said that India's action against Pakistan was done "to avenge that act of wiping off the Sindoor".