Indian envoy urges Pakistan to take the ‘off-ramp' and stop escalating the conflict
LONDON: India's high commissioner to the UK
Vikram Doraiswami
has said that India's conflict with Pakistan could end right now if Pakistan takes the opportunity of an 'off-ramp'.
'If Pakistan stops attacking our military facilities, the matter ends there.
But it is for them to decide,' he told Sky's Yalda Hakim on Thursday.
'We have made it abundantly clear we are not looking for an escalation. But if Pakistan responds, we will respond along exactly the same lines. We did not attack their military. As they have now started trying to attack our military bases, we have hit back at their air defence systems.'
He said the original escalation was the Pakistan-sponsored terrorist attack at Pahalgam.
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'Our response was focused solely on terrorist infrastructure. The object of this exercise was clearly to avoid military escalation.'
Hakim referred to a Reuters report claiming Pakistan aircraft had shot down Indian fighter jets. 'There is no evidence of that. We haven't confirmed any such thing,' he said.
'You had the Pakistan defence minister on your show who said the evidence for that was on social media. If it satisfies Pakistan's ego to say they have done something, they could have used that as an
off-ramp
. But they chose not to and have continued to escalate. What is Pakistan retaliating about? They are retaliating against attacks on
terrorism infrastructure
so what does that tell you of their relationship with terror groups?'
Asked if India was concerned at the loss of a Rafale jet, he said 'We don't know if this has happened.
by Taboola
by Taboola
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As a famous British admiral once said, the purpose of military hardware is that it has been used. If Pakistan escalates, we have the capacity to really punish them harder.'
When asked if India funded the Baloch Liberation Army, he pulled out a photo of US-designated terrorist Hafiz Abdul Rauf, brother of JeM chief Masood Azhar, at a funeral for terrorists killed in Operation Sindoor, with the Pakistani military present and coffins draped in Pakistan's national flag.
'If you are going to give terrorists state funerals, what does that make of your system? The simple solution is for the international community to tell Pakistan it has an opportunity for an off-ramp. The world should have compelled Pakistan 30 years ago to take down this infrastructure. They have not done so.'
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Tavleen Singh writes: Political poster boys
An unforeseen consequence of Operation Sindoor has been that South Asia's two poster boys of dynastic democracy surfaced and made fools of themselves. I speak of Bilawal Bhutto and Rahul Gandhi. They would not be considered political leaders at all if it were not for their illustrious surnames. As someone who believes dynastic succession should have ended when feudalism did, I watched the performance of these two political princes with real interest. The first performance came from Bilawal Bhutto, who made a speech on the banks of the Indus a day after India decided to suspend the Indus Water Treaty. In this speech, he threatened that either water would flow down the Indus or the 'blood of our enemies'. His Urdu remains bad, so he used melodrama to compensate and, in the manner of a crazed messiah, shrieked 'the Indus has always been ours, is ours, and will be ours'. This one speech was proof that not only was the heir to the mighty Bhutto dynasty linguistically challenged, but that he was politically challenged as well. But Pakistan's military rulers were clearly impressed with his performance and sent him off to Washington to convince people that it was Pakistan that was the victim of terrorism and that India's allegations were lies. It took Shashi Tharoor, who was also in Washington, one minute to demolish the narrative that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's heir was trying to weave. Tharoor said he sympathised with Bilawal because his mother had been killed by jihadi terrorists, but he seemed to have forgotten Hillary Clinton's warning to Pakistan. If you breed vipers in your backyard, you cannot expect that they will only attack your neighbour. Pakistan's terrorists are home-bred. Last week came a performance from the heir to our own storied dynasty. Rahul has, since Operation Sindoor, made statements that have been applauded in Pakistan even by Hafiz Saeed. But last week, he outdid himself. In the manner of a schoolboy discussing a cricket match, and with a sneery grin on his face, he imitated Donald Trump having a conversation with our prime minister on the phone and saying 'Narendra, Surrender'. And then he mimicked Narendra Modi saying 'ji huzoor'. The point the Leader of the Opposition was trying to make was that when his grandmother was prime minister, the Seventh Fleet was sent by Richard Nixon to warn her that breaking up Pakistan would have consequences. And she had courageously remained fixed on the course that she had set. A dangerous analogy to evoke, because Indira Gandhi also ended up snatching defeat from the jaws of victory (to use that useful cliché) by signing the Simla Agreement. All the cards were in India's hands. There were more than 90,000 prisoners of war in the custody of the Indian Army, so she could have told Bhutto that there would be no agreement without a signed guarantee that the Kashmir issue would end now. Instead, the agreement has a feeble reference to Kashmir being decided bilaterally. Years later, I happened to learn from a close associate of Bhutto that he boasted afterwards that he had outdone her. What exactly was the point that Indira's grandson was trying to make? Was he trying to prove the debunked falsehood that Modi agreed to a ceasefire because of pressure from Trump? Was he trying to say that the war should have continued indefinitely? Or was he trying to say what Congress spokespersons have said in TV debates, which is that the war should have continued until Pakistan is broken up once more? This was never the objective of Operation Sindoor. It had the limited objective of destroying Pakistan's terrorist infrastructure and from all accounts this objective was achieved. To return, though, to the poster boys of dynastic democracy. Bilawal has lost his relevance in Pakistani politics and is now merely a spokesman for the military men who control the political chessboard. Rahul remains relevant because he is fully in control of our oldest political party. And the only national party, we have other than the BJP. We have no choice but to take what he says seriously, which is why it is worrying that he continues to sound like a schoolboy with a special grudge against Modi for daring to usurp India, which he considers his birthright to rule since his family once did. It is this idea that India remains the private property of the Dynasty that is destroying the Congress Party. If you have been following recent events, you would have noticed that the Congress leaders in the parliamentary delegations have done an extremely good job. The only people who have let the party down are those who constitute the coterie around our own poster boy of dynastic democracy. It could be time for those who want Congress to survive and thrive to come together and urge the Dynasty's heirs to consider playing the role that the Chairman Emeritus plays in companies. If they agree, they can continue to have relevance in the family firm, but can move away from playing an active role. How long does the Congress Party want to pretend that Rahul is its prime minister-in-waiting when he has been unable to win a single Lok Sabha election for the party? One way or another dynastic democracy is a bad idea. And it is abundantly obvious that India's voters saw this before our political leaders have.
