Shashi Tharoor (File phot)
NEW DELHI: Senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor on Wednesday reiterated India’s stand that it was a call from Pakistan’s DGMO and not US President Donald Trump which led to the pause in India’s Operation Sindoor against Pakistan.Thaoor said it was India’s successful strikes on the intervening night of May 9-10 that prompted Pakistan to seek peace, as the operation “sent a very clear message that we [India] will not sit quietly if terror is unleashed on us”.After Operation Sindoor, as the tension escalated, the Indian forces stepped up the retaliation against Pakistan — bombing the Rahim Yar Khan Pakistani Air Force (PAF) base in Pakistan’s southern Punjab region and Nur Khan air base in Rawalpindi.”The successful strikes on the night of 9-10 May and the ability of India to intercept the attempted Pakistani response, when they sent missiles to Delhi on the morning of 10th May, is what contributed undoubtedly, and not Mr Trump, to the call by the Pakistani DGMO to his Indian counterpart asking for peace,” Thaoor was quoted as saying by news agency PTI.Speaking at the launch of his book “Whither India-Pakistan Relations Today? Can They Ever Be Good Neighbours?” Tharoor said that India has little inclination to make the first move in repairing ties with Pakistan after decades of disappointments, insisting that the responsibility now lies with Islamabad to dismantle terror networks operating from its soil.He said, “At the end of the day, India did not have very much choice on how to react to all this. A couple of days after Pahalgam, I wrote an op-ed advocating precisely this. You can imagine my satisfaction and semi-disbelief that I didn’t realise anyone in Delhi would be reading my op-ed, which is why I was such an enthusiastic supporter of it. It followed exactly the course of action I had advised in my op-ed. With Balakot in 2019 and Operation Sindoor now, India has sent a very clear message that we will not sit quietly if terror is unleashed on us.”The Thiruvananthapuram MP argued that successive Indian attempts at outreach, from Jawaharlal Nehru’s pact with Liaqat Ali Khan in 1950, to Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s Lahore bus journey in 1999, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Lahore stopover in 2015, were each “betrayed” by hostility from across the border.“Given the record of Pakistani behaviour, the onus is on them. They’re the ones who have to take the first steps to show some sincerity about dismantling terror infrastructure on their soil. Why can’t they be serious about shutting down these terror camps? Everyone knows where they are. The UN committee has a list of 52 names of individuals, organisations and places in Pakistan. It’s not that Pakistan doesn’t know they exist,” Tharoor was quoted as saying by news agency PTI.He pressed for “serious intent,” urging Islamabad to “shut them down, arrest some of these characters.” India, he added, would be willing to reciprocate but “won’t take the first step now.”Recalling the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, Tharoor said New Delhi had submitted “overwhelming evidence” of Pakistani involvement, from live intercepts to dossiers, yet “not one mastermind has been prosecuted.” He pointed out that India had shown “extraordinary restraint” despite repeated provocations, which eventually gave way to surgical strikes in 2016 and “Operation Sindoor.”“In my book Pax Indica, which was published in 2012, I had warned that if there was ever another Mumbai-like attack of comparable impact, with clear evidence of Pakistani complicity, the restraint we had shown in 2008 might become impossible and all bets would be off. And indeed, that is exactly what happened. No democratic government, least of all in India with its long record of betrayals by Pakistan, could sit idle while its neighbour assaults its civilians and innocent holidaymakers with impunity,” he said.Tharoor further said that “peace and tranquillity on the borders is indispensable to our national interest,” citing how France and Germany reconciled after World War II, and how the United States eventually normalised ties with Vietnam, as examples of adversaries becoming partners.The discussion also featured former foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal, former Indian ambassador to Pakistan T. C. A. Raghavan, former Army chief General Deepak Kapoor, and academic Amitabh Mattoo. Go to Source
