- 5/25/2025
Congress MP Shashi Tharoor led a powerful all-party Indian delegation to New York, where they met with academic leaders, think tanks, and media as part of a diplomatic outreach to reinforce India’s global stance against terrorism.
The message was clear and united: India will not tolerate terror in any form, anywhere.
The delegation visited the 9/11 Memorial, honoring victims of global terrorism, and urged stronger international cooperation to dismantle terror networks and hold their enablers accountable.
India’s call for zero tolerance resonated across diplomatic circles as the country pushes for firm global mechanisms to counter terror.
#ShashiTharoor #IndiaUSRelations #GlobalTerrorism #9_11Memorial #DiplomaticMission #IndiaFightsTerror #ZeroTolerance #UNSecurity #OperationSindoor #InternationalRelations #TharoorInNY #IndianDelegation #CounterTerrorism #GlobalSecurity #Geopolitics
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Shashi Tharoor: 'No One Sitting In Pakistan Should Believe They Can Kill Indians With Impunity' :: https://www.oneindia.com/international/shashi-tharoor-no-one-sitting-in-pakistan-should-believe-they-can-kill-indians-with-impunity-4163033.html?ref=DMDesc
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The message was clear and united: India will not tolerate terror in any form, anywhere.
The delegation visited the 9/11 Memorial, honoring victims of global terrorism, and urged stronger international cooperation to dismantle terror networks and hold their enablers accountable.
India’s call for zero tolerance resonated across diplomatic circles as the country pushes for firm global mechanisms to counter terror.
#ShashiTharoor #IndiaUSRelations #GlobalTerrorism #9_11Memorial #DiplomaticMission #IndiaFightsTerror #ZeroTolerance #UNSecurity #OperationSindoor #InternationalRelations #TharoorInNY #IndianDelegation #CounterTerrorism #GlobalSecurity #Geopolitics
Also Read
Shashi Tharoor Says 'I Don't Work For Govt', Backs Operation Sindoor As India's Response To Pahalgam Attack :: https://www.oneindia.com/india/shashi-tharoor-says-i-dont-work-for-govt-backs-operation-sindoor-as-indias-response-to-pahalgam-4163119.html?ref=DMDesc
Shashi Tharoor: 'No One Sitting In Pakistan Should Believe They Can Kill Indians With Impunity' :: https://www.oneindia.com/international/shashi-tharoor-no-one-sitting-in-pakistan-should-believe-they-can-kill-indians-with-impunity-4163033.html?ref=DMDesc
Foreign Secy Vikram Misri To Brief Parliamentary Panel Today On India-Pak Conflict, Op Sindoor :: https://www.oneindia.com/india/foreign-secy-vikram-misri-to-brief-parliamentary-panel-today-on-india-pak-conflict-op-sindoor-4157293.html?ref=DMDesc
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NewsTranscript
00:00First of all, thank you all for being here. It's amazing on a Saturday night of the Memorial Day weekend that we were able to get such a star turnout and thank you all for coming. I had a chance to say hello to many of you during the reception but some of you I haven't and I do want to say hello and acknowledge the gratitude of your presence here this evening.
00:19My colleagues and I literally arrived this afternoon and our first stop was the September 11th Memorial. It was obviously a very moving moment for us but it was also meant to send 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.
00:45Unlike the US, I'm afraid we've had to endure a very much larger number of terrorist attacks in India but we came both as a reminder that this is a shared problem but also out of a spirit of solidarity with the victims who included Indians as Indra was reminding me someone, a young Indian working in her own company was one of the victims of 9-11.
01:15Indians, Indians, Indians, Indians, Indians, Indians, Indians, Americans and very many other nationalities who were affected. It's a global problem, it's a scourge and we must all fight it unitedly.
01:24So that was a very important message to convey and my colleagues and I did that by going to the memorial and leaving roses on some of the names around the memorial pool.
01:40And having done that, we are now proceeding as has been mentioned already to four other countries before returning to the US, not to New York but to Washington DC on the 3rd of June when Congress will come back from its recess as well.
01:54So our idea is very much to speak to a cross section of public and political opinion in each of the countries we are going to about recent events which obviously troubled a number of people around the world and which now have subsided.
02:17There is a reasonable amount of calm that's raining on the border within India and Pakistan today but the fundamental underlying problem remains and it's important that we try and enlarge your understanding of our thinking and our concerns about what's going on.
02:37So it's for us an opportunity, we will be in every country meeting members of the executive, meeting members of the legislature, meeting think tankers and influential foreign policy experts and at the same time interacting with the media and public opinion in every one of these places.
02:56We are on our way to Guyana tonight where Independence Day celebrations are about to take place and we will be seeing the president and the foreign minister and members of parliament there and we carry on on some of the programs in these other countries.
03:12Vinaya had asked me to say a few words about what happened by way of context, I mean I think you're all aware that India has tried to be focused on a very different narrative from some of our neighbors.
03:29Our 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 not just into the 21st century but into the world and the opportunities that the 21st century offers.
03:57And perhaps in that process we had allowed ourselves in some ways to be complacent, complacent may be too unkind a word, but we had not perhaps braced ourselves sufficiently for the malign influences in our neighborhood that did not want that story, that narrative to be told in an uninterrupted manner.
04:23We had been seeing in Jammu and Kashmir, which as you know has for the long, long time been coveted by our neighbors on the other side, Pakistan, we had been seeing not just peace but increasing prosperity.
04:40In fact, Vinay gave me this wonderful nuggets that the number of tourists in Kashmir last year was double the number of tourists in Aspen, Colorado last year.
04:52So that was the kind of the kind of the kind of of not just normalcy but growth prosperity that the people of Kashmir were enjoying as Indians and foreigners were flocking to Kashmir for tourism.
05:06So some people decided that they would want, first of all, to attack that process of normalization.
05:15Second, to undermine the overall Indian narrative as well as the prosperity of the people of Kashmir.
05:23Third, by doing so in an atrocious manner, that is, it was not just a terrorist attack of somebody indiscriminately blowing up people with a bomb.
05:35It was a bunch of people going around identifying the religion of the people before them and killing them on that basis,
05:42which was clearly intended to provoke a backlash in the rest of India since the victims were overwhelmingly Hindu.
05:53In fact, 26 people died, 25 Indians and one Nepalese and the Nepalese happened, of course, didn't get a chance to say he was Nepalese but he was a Hindu so he would have probably been killed anyway.
06:07And quite astonishingly, one person who wasn't killed was a Hindu professor who happened to be able to recite the Kalima, the first verse of the Koran and therefore was not shot, which is a very interesting message.
06:24And it was very, very clearly, I mean, for us it was not that there was any doubt about the motives of these people, but it was particularly driven home.
06:33In many cases, the husband was shot and the wife was told to convey the message back that he was shot for his faith.
06:41And I'm very proud as an Indian to say that that did not happen, that there was no backlash, that Indians held together unitedly in the face of this atrocity.
06:53The Kashmiris, who are overwhelmingly Muslim, as you know, were not just completely distraught by what happened, but there was public rejection of this.
07:07The next day, the entire state downed its shutters.
07:12There was a public observance of support and solidarity for the victims.
07:17The state assembly as well, all shades of political opinion.
07:23One of the victims, I should have added, was a Kashmiri Muslim pony operator who attempted not just to save the lives of his customers, but to snatch the Kalashnikov, one of the killers, and it was turned against him.
07:38But others, I mean, I had a victim from my state of Kerala, who was a 61-year-old man who was walking in the meadow with his youngish daughter and her twin sons, age six, when they shot him.
07:55And I went to his home and called on his widow and his daughter and grandchildren, and it was very, very moving when this girl said that though she lost her father that day, she found two brothers.
08:11And the two brothers were two Kashmiri Muslim men who took her to safety, protected her sons, and eventually then accompanied her to the mortuary to identify her father's body and bring her back.
08:25So I give these examples just to say there was an extraordinary amount of togetherness cutting across religious and other divides that people had tried to provoke.
08:37But the message was very clear that there was a malign intent that I've just spelled out for you, and India, sadly, had no reason to doubt where it came from, because within one hour of the atrocity, a group called the Resistance Front had claimed credit.
08:57The Resistance Front was known for some years to be a frontal organization of the band prescribed Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is on the U.S. designated terror list as well, as well as the U.N. sanctions committees.
09:14And India had gone to the U.N. sanctions committee with information about the Resistance Front in 2023 and in 24, and now, sadly, it had acted in 25.
09:26They repeated their claim the next day until, of course, global condemnation, I think, woke their handlers up to the dangers as represented, and then they deleted their claim on the third day.
09:40But by then, the claim had been made, recorded, registered, and reported.
09:44And for us, therefore, the culpability lay not just with the five, four or five, we're not 100% sure, evil killers who came to Pahalgam and did this atrocity, but also with those who had sent them, financed them, equipped them, trained them, guided them into doing this.
10:11And since we knew where Lashkar-e-Taiba is headquartered, it has not just a safe haven, but a rather generous 200-acre campus in a city in the heartland of Pakistani Punjab, we also knew where the responsibility lay.
10:27Sadly, Pakistan chose to follow its usual path of denial.
10:34In fact, Pakistan, with the help of China, succeeded in removing a reference to the Resistance Front from the resolution of condemnation that was drafted in the Security Council, the press statement, actually, not resolution, in the Security Council of the U.N.
10:50and two days later.
10:52But though the name was not mentioned, it was, as I said, a matter of public record, and we knew what was happening.
10:59India replied immediately that we would not let this go unanswered.
11:04I don't work for the government, as you know, I work for an opposition party, but I myself authored an op-ed in one of India's leading papers, the Indian Express, within a couple of days, saying the time had come to hit hard but hit smart.
11:18And I'm pleased to say that's exactly what India did.
11:22On the night of the 6th, 7th of May, it was 6th here, it was 7th for us, at 1.05 in the morning, a time chosen deliberately to avoid any risk of too many civilians wandering about or any collateral damage.
11:37Very precise and calibrated strikes took place on nine specific known terrorist bases, headquarters, and launch pads.
11:48Those included those of the Lachkar-e-Tawbah in a place called Muridke, those of the Jais-e-Mohamad, the organization that is responsible, amongst other things, for the murder of Daniel Pearl, some of you knew in New York, and others, Jais-e-Mohamad and Bahawalpur.
12:04And in Muzaffarabad, which is in Pakistan, the Pakistani-occupied part of Kashmir, there were no less than three different terror organizations which had their bases there, Harakatul Ansar, Harakatul Mujahideen, and others.
12:18And so India sent a clear message, number one, that it was not going to take terror lying down, it would answer.
12:28But equally, that by delivering very precisely calculated, calibrated strikes on very specific targets, it was also sending a message that this was not meant to be the opening salvo in a protracted war, but just an act of retribution that we were prepared to stop with that act.
12:51In other words, not just in other words, it was officially conveyed, there is a regular hotline between the two directors general of military operations, the message was conveyed that this was the intent, that it was pointed out,
13:07that no military targets, that no military targets, no civilian targets, and no governmental targets had been hit, not even by accident, and that the message therefore had been delivered exactly and precisely to the terrorists and their handlers.
13:22Nonetheless, Pakistan chose to respond and respond, I'm sorry to say, with indiscriminate shelling across the border on the very first day and night, which sadly killed 19 civilians and injured grievously 59 others,
13:43including, including Carmelite nuns in a convent, Sikhs worshipping in a gurudwara, and others who happened to simply be in the line of fire because they lived in districts adjoining the Pakistani border.
14:00When this happened, India had no choice but to retaliate in kind.
14:07The matters got worse the next day as the Pakistanis followed up artillery shelling with a serious invasion of drones and missiles.
14:20India's air defences were able to hold them off, but in turn, India returned the complement, and on the night of 9th, 10th May,
14:30India hit 11 Pakistani military targets, including a rather well-known air base that's just one and a half kilometers away from military headquarters of Pakistan and Rabalpindi.
14:46The following morning, we got a call, or our Director General of Military Operations got a call from the Pakistani Director General of Military Operations saying they'd like to stop this,
14:56and we said, we've been saying all along, we didn't want to start anything, we were just sending a message to terrorists, you started, we replied, if you stop, we'll stop, and they stopped.
15:09There was an 88-hour war.
15:14We look back on that with a great deal of frustration because it needn't have happened at all.
15:23Lives have been lost.
15:25But at the same time, we look back on this experience with a steely and renewed sense of determination.
15:31There has now got to be a new normal.
15:37No 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.
15:47There will be a price to pay, and that price has been going up systematically.
15:53I'll just take you briefly through what happened.
15:55You may remember in 2015, well, you may not remember because this is our problem, not yours,
16:00but in 2015, in January, there was an attack on an Indian air base, a place called Potankot,
16:05and our Prime Minister had just made a goodwill visit to Pakistan the previous month.
16:10On the 25th of December, he'd attended the birthday celebrations of then-Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif,
16:16whose granddaughter's wedding was on the same day, he'd given gifts.
16:19So when this happened, he was so astonished that he actually called the Pakistani Prime Minister and said,
16:25why don't you join the investigation?
16:27Let's solve who is doing this.
16:29And the Pakistani, you can imagine the horror of the Indian military establishment at this idea,
16:34that Pakistani investigators are going to come to an Indian air base, but they came.
16:41And they went back to Pakistan and said, oh, the Indians did it to themselves.
16:45That was the last trope.
16:47I mean, it was just the, we'd already gone through the horrors of 2008 in Mumbai when 170 people had been killed,
16:54and the Pakistani denials at that time were laid bare, not just by the fact that we caught one of the terrorists alive,
17:01and his identity, his address, his family, et cetera, were identified in Pakistan,
17:06but equally because that drama took place over three days during which Western intelligence agencies trained their recording devices,
17:15amongst other things, on Pakistani, the chilling voice of the Pakistani handler,
17:22giving minute-by-minute instructions to the killers in Mumbai.
17:25So, the evidence was there, there'd been denial, and that denial was proven to be completely false.
17:32And as you know, thereafter, the Pakistanis claimed not to know where Osama bin Laden was,
17:38until he was found in a safe house right next to an army cantonment,
17:43in a city dominated by the army.
17:47This is Pakistan, and I'm afraid for us,
17:502015 was the last opportunity for them to behave,
17:54to cooperate, to really show they were serious about ending terror,
17:58as they claimed every time that they were.
18:01And since they did not do it in January, in September 2015,
18:05there was another attack in a place called Uri, also not far from the border,
18:10and this time India breached the line of control,
18:14which we had rigorously observed throughout in every previous skirmish.
18:18We had never crossed the line of control.
18:21We crossed it with a surgical strike in September of 2015.
18:24That seemed to calm things down a bit, but unfortunately, in January of 2019,
18:29there was another terror attack in a place called Pulwama,
18:32killing 40 Indians at that point.
18:35And then India responded, not just by breaching the line of control,
18:39but also breaching the international border,
18:42and striking with our air force a known terror training camp in a place called Balakot.
18:51Now, we have not just crossed the LOC, we have also crossed the international border,
18:57we have hit Pakistan in their heartland.
19:01And we have done so, as I say, only to send a message about terror.
19:07We are not interested, and we still remain absolutely clear,
19:11that we are not interested in warfare with Pakistan.
19:14We would much rather be left alone to grow our economy and pull our people into the world
19:21that they're already getting ready for in the 21st century.
19:24We have no desire to have anything that the Pakistanis have.
19:29Sadly, we may be a status quo power, they are not.
19:33They are a revisionist power, they covet territory that India controls,
19:37and they want to have it at any price.
19:39And if they can't get it through conventional means, they're willing to get it through terrorism.
19:44That is not acceptable to us, and that's really the message that we are here to give all of us,
19:50all of you in this country and elsewhere.
19:55We are determined now that there's got to be a new bottom line to this.
20:02We have tried everything, international dossiers, complaints to sanctions committee, diplomacy,
20:09even this joint investigation attempt, everything has been tried.
20:14Pakistan has remained in denial.
20:16There has been absolutely no conviction, no serious criminal prosecution,
20:20no attempt to dismantle the terror infrastructure in that country,
20:24and the persistence of safe havens.
20:27So from our point of view, this is it.
20:30You do this, you're going to get this back.
20:33And we have demonstrated with this operation that we can do it with a degree of precision
20:38and with a degree of restraint that the world, we hope, will understand.
20:43We have a right to self-defense.
20:45We've exercised that right.
20:46We have not done so irresponsibly,
20:49and we have not done so in a way that would have warranted a wider conflagration.
20:54That's really the message I wanted to give you all today.
20:57I'm sure you have questions and comments,
20:59and my colleagues represent, as I say, four parties amongst the five of us,
21:04and there's a wide span of views.
21:06We're all happy to join in conversation with you.
21:08Thank you all very much once again for coming and being with us today.
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