New York, May 25 (IANS) Operation Sindoor has shown Pakistan that India can hit terrorism infrastructure with a “degree of precision” and put it on notice that if its terrorists hit New Delhi there will be consequences, Congress leader Shashi Tharoor said as his team of members of Parliament brought the anti-terrorism message to the US.
“We are determined now that there’s got to be a new bottom line” to Pakistan’s terrorist attacks on India, he said here at the start of the mission of MPs of the BJP and the opposition parties.
“The perpetrators of terror should indeed be brought to justice, and we are not going to stop our hunt for those who did this latest atrocity,” the Congress leader said.
“We have tried everything, international dossier, complaints,” to no avail, he said, explaining why India directly attacked the terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan and the areas of Kashmir it occupies.
Speaking at India’s consulate here, he said the team will be meeting government officials, legislature members, think tanks, and influential foreign policy experts, and interact with the media and the public.
He said that they will call for global solidarity against terrorism and explain how India has suffered from terrorism and was forced to act. The team will go from here to Guyana, Panama, Colombia, and Brazil, before returning to the US for meetings in Washington.
In a forceful display of the nation uniting against terrorism, the team is headed by Tharoor from the opposition Congress Party and includes Shambhavi of the Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas), Sarfaraz Ahmad of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, and Milind Murli Deora of the Shiv Sena.
“I don’t work for the government, as you know. I work for an opposition party,” Tharoor said of his role. The other members are Shashank Mani Tripathi, Bhubaneswar Kalita, and Tejasvi Surya of the BJP, and GM Harish Balayogi of the Telugu Desam Party, a National Democratic Alliance partner.
After terrorists from ‘The Resistance Front’, an affiliate of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, massacred 26 people in Jammu and Kshmir’s Pahalgam, India struck terrorist centres in Pakistan.
Pakistan then attacked India, targeting civilian structures like places of worship, including gurudwaras, temples, and convents, and medical facilities, leading to an escalation of the conflict.
The team of MPs started with a visit to the 9/11 Memorial at the World Trade Centre to honour the 2,731 victims of the worst terrorist attack in the US, which also has connections to Pakistan.
A large number of members of the diaspora and others joined the MPs, who placed flowers at the monument.
Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, which carried out the attack, was given asylum and government protection by the Pakistani government and was killed in Abbottabad near Pakistani military facilities by the US Navy’s elite SEAL unit.
Tharoor said the visit to the 9/11 memorial was “a reminder that this is a shared problem, but also out of a spirit of solidarity with the victims”.
The team sent “a very strong message that we are here in a city which is bearing still the scars of that savage terrorist attack in the wake of yet another terrorist attack in our own country”, he said.
Tharoor said, “The Phalgam attack was planned by those who wanted to disrupt the process of normalisation in Kashmir and damage the prosperity of the Kashmiri people. Their broader aim was also to provoke a bigger backlash in the rest of India by trying to make it a religious issue, singling out their victims by religion.”
But it failed because “there was an extraordinary amount of togetherness cutting across religious and other divides in India that people have tried to provoke”, he said.
He said that TRF took responsibility for the Pahalgam killings. India had informed the UN Security Council’s anti-terrorism sanctions committee about the TRF, he said.
Soon after the Pahalgam attack, the Security Council issued a statement condemning the attack, but China and Pakistan together prevented it from naming the TRF, he said, showing Islamabad’s complicity in the attack.
India’s consulate said that the MPs also met with prominent think tanks, academics, and media to “highlight the strategic ties between India and the US and underscore the collaborative efforts to tackle the evolving threat of terrorism”.
“The delegation conveyed India’s firm message of zero tolerance and unified national resolve against terrorism,” it added.
–IANS
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