Tharoor says India will not tolerate cross-border terror, warns Pakistan of 'price to pay'

Congress MP Shashi Tharoor has said that after the Pahalgam terror attacks, India has adopted a new approach, warning that anyone in Pakistan who thinks they can cross the border and harm Indian citizens will face serious consequences.

Tharoor is leading a delegation of Indian parliamentarians to Guyana, Panama, Colombia, Brazil, and the US, conveying India's resolve against terrorism and emphasising Pakistan's links to terrorism.

The multi-party delegations to different countries will underline that the recent conflict with Pakistan was triggered by the Pahalgam terror attack and not Operation Sindoor, as alleged by Islamabad. 

In an interaction hosted by the Consulate General of India in New York with a select group of prominent members of the Indian-American community and individuals from leading media and think tanks on Saturday, Tharoor said that India’s message to Pakistan has been clear: “We didn't want to start anything."

We were just sending a message to terrorists. You started, we replied. If you stop, we stop. And they stopped. There was an 88-hour war. We look back on that with a great deal of frustration because it needn’t have happened at all. Lives have been lost. But at the same time, we look back on this experience with a steely and renewed sense of determination. There is now got to be a new norm. No one sitting in Pakistan is going to be allowed to believe that they can just walk across the border and kill our citizens with impunity. There will be a price to pay and that price has been going up systematically,” Tharoor said.

He said that India has focused on a very different narrative from some of its neighbours. "Our focus for some years now has been on being the world's fastest growing free market democracy, attempting to focus on the development of our economy, our high emphasis on technology and technological growth and pulling large numbers of people from below the poverty line," he said. 

Tharoor spoke in detail about the horrific April 22 Pahalgam attack in Jammu and Kashmir in which 26 civilians were killed, including one Nepalese citizen, for which The Resistance Front took responsibility and then retracted.

The delegation led by Tharoor includes Sarfaraz Ahmad (JMM), Ganti Harish Madhur Balayogi (TDP), Shashank Mani Tripathi (BJP), Bhubaneswar Kalita (BJP), Milind Deora (Shiv Sena), Tejasvi Surya (BJP), and India’s former Ambassador to the US, Taranjit Sandhu. The delegation reached New York on Saturday and will travel to Guyana from here. It will return to the US on June 3.

Tharoor underscored that India is "not interested, and we still remain absolutely clear, we are not interested in warfare with Pakistan." 

"We have no desire to have anything that the Pakistanis have. Sadly, we may be a status quo power. They are not. They are a revisionist power. They covet territory that India controls, and they want to have it at any price. And if they can't get it through conventional means, they're willing to get it through terrorism. That is not acceptable to us, and that's really the message that we are here to give all of you in this country and elsewhere," he said.

Tharoor said that over the years, India has tried everything from giving international dossiers, complaints to the sanctions committee, and diplomacy. "Everything has been tried. Pakistan has remained in denial. So from our point of view, this is it. You do this, you're going to get this back. And we have demonstrated with this operation that we can do it with a degree of precision and with a degree of restraint that the world, we hope, will understand. We have a right to self-defence. We've exercised that right. We have not done so irresponsibly…That's really the message I wanted to give you all today," he said

"I don't work for the government, as you know, I work for an opposition party,” Tharoor said, adding that he had authored an op-ed within a couple of days of the Pahalgam attack, saying “the time had come to hit hard, hit smart".

“And I'm pleased to say that's exactly what India did.” He added that “India sent a clear message” that it was not going to take terror lying down and it would answer.