‘Trump's Statements on India-Pakistan Ceasefire Were Disappointing': Shashi Tharoor

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15-05-2025

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Full Transcript | 'Trump's Statements on India-Pakistan Ceasefire Were Disappointing': Shashi Tharoor
Karan Thapar
42 minutes ago
Shashi Tharoor speaks on the implications of and the unresolved questions left behind by the India-Pakistan ceasefire.
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New Delhi: In an interview with Karan Thapar for The Wire, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor who is a former Minister of State for External Affairs and also the present chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs, speaks on the implications of and the unresolved questions left behind by the India-Pakistan ceasefire. Full transcript:
Karan Thapar: Hello and welcome to a special interview for The Wire. Today we shall discuss the implications of Saturday's India-Pakistan ceasefire and the unresolved questions it's left behind. Has this weakened India's long-standing traditional opposition to third party involvement? Why did so few countries call out Pakistan by name? Did the Indian Air Force lose planes and how well were questions about that handled by the government? My guest is former Minister of State for External Affairs and the present chairman of the parliamentary standing committee Shashi Tharoor.
Shashi Tharoor, does the fact Donald Trump and Marco Rubio tweeted the India-Pakistan ceasefire and that the agreement was for a full and immediate ceasefire before India or Pakistan could confirm the news suggests that this was in some credible sense mediated by them?
Shashi Tharoor: Yeah, I must say I found those tweets particularly President Trump's second tweet on Truth Social troubling at various levels. I mean I have to say it was disappointing in four ways, four important ways. First it implied a false equivalence between the victim and the perpetrator. It seemingly overlooked the US's own past unwavering stance against Pakistan's well-documented links to cross-border terrorism. You remember the whole Osama bin Laden episode from which we thought the Americans had learned a little bit about how much they should believe Pakistani denials.
Second, it offers Pakistan a negotiating framework which it certainly has not earned. India will not negotiate with a terrorist gun pointed at its head. Third, it internationalises the Kashmir dispute, an obvious objective of the terrorists. India as you know rejects the idea that there is a dispute anymore. It's something that we want to consider to be an internal affair of our country and I think we've never requested nor are we likely to seek any foreign countries' mediation over our problems with Pakistan.
And fourth it rehyphenates India and Pakistan in the global imagination and specifically in the White House's imagination. For decades now world leaders and every American president have been encouraged not to club their visits to India with visits to Pakistan, starting with President Clinton in 2000. That's the way it's been. So it really is a backward step that all these things have happened in this particular post. So all I can say Karan is that it suggests to me a post by a president who has not been fully briefed.
Karan Thapar: But the truth of the matter is that minutes after President Trump tweeted, Shehbaz Sharif, the Pakistani prime minister publicly thanked him, and I'm quoting Shehbaz Sharif, for brokering the ceasefire. The Pakistanis clearly believe that it's been brokered by Trump and America and Trump himself talked about a long night of talks where he had mediated. So my point is the simple one. Has America mediated this ceasefire?
Shashi Tharoor: I don't believe so. Not in the sense that I would understand the term mediation. Let me explain. Let's assume that the Americans called the Indians and the Americans called the Pakistanis. We know this for a fact because if you just look at Mr. Jaishankar's Twitter (X) record, he says when he spoke to a foreign minister, he's put it on his Twitter, right? That spoke to Rubio, spoke to the French foreign minister, spoke to the British foreign minister, spoke to the UAE foreign minister and so on and so forth.
So there were these conversations happening. Now there's a difference between Jaishankar telling a foreign minister, 'Listen if the Pakistanis do this we will do this. If the Pakistanis don't do this we will not do that.' That's one kind of conversation. And then the foreign minister he's talking to calling the Pakistanis and saying, 'Hey listen I've been talking to the Indians and what they're telling me is this and this and this and you might want to draw some conclusions from that.' That's not a mediation. That is a constructive set of engagements.
A mediation would have been if Jaishankar called the Americans and said, 'Listen we want to get this thing done with, would you convey to the Pakistanis please ABC.' That I don't think India would have done. I would be astonished if India had done that and I'm reasonably confident for what I know.
Karan Thapar: Can I interrupt and ask how do you know what Jaishankar said or did? You're in the opposition, you're not a member of the government. Your own party in the shape and form of Rahul Gandhi and Mr. Kharge are questioning whether there was American mediation. How can you be so certain there wasn't?
Shashi Tharoor: You are asking me for my personal view I hope Karan and I'm giving you my best educated guess. That is, that from a long experience of the way in which these things are conducted and have functioned. I know the way in which Indian foreign policy conducts itself and Jaishankar as you know is a career diplomat before becoming a political foreign minister.
This is the way he would function. This is the way he would be trained to function, expect to function and would normally have functioned. If I'm wrong, I'm perfectly prepared to be proven wrong. But you've asked me for my view and I've told you this is my best educated guess as to how Jaishankar and indeed any Indian foreign minister who's properly briefed on this matter would have behaved.
Karan Thapar: Let me put it like this. What happened on Saturday is very similar to Tashkent in 1965 when Cosian and the then Soviet Union intervened or Kargil in 1999 when Clinton and America intervene. This time Trump and Rubio were the ones who got both sides to agree to a ceasefire. This is the very example he gave of history repeating itself.
Shashi Tharoor: But what happened in 1999? Clinton summoned Nawaz Sharif to Washington, read him the riot act, and he used his visit to Washington to climb down from a conflict that he had embarrassed himself gravely with. Now, this is not a question of mediation. This is a question of the United States telling one of the parties to back off.
Now, if that is the precedent you're talking about, I'm perfectly prepared to accept that could have happened, that the United States could have told the Pakistanis, 'Listen, the Indians have hit you very hard. They've destroyed a couple of your air base runways. It looks like they're serious about continuing. Do you really want to prolong this? We think you should back off.' That's not called mediation. That's called pressure on Pakistan. Possible.
It's equally possible that Rubio could have told the Indians, 'You're a nuclear powered state. If you aspire to be a UN Security Council member on a permanent basis, back off now. It's gone too far. You're damaging your credibility.' That message could have been conveyed to both sides equally effectively. That's what I'm saying.
Look, I think India had conducted itself absolutely in a calibrated responsible manner. It had said at the very beginning that it wasn't trying to see the attack on the nine terrorist sites as the opening salvo of some sort of protracted war. It had said very clearly, we're done. This is it. This is all we're doing now. If Pakistan reacts, we will be obliged to react back to them. If they don't react, we are not planning to initiate any action.
To my mind, there was no warning needed to be issued to the Indians. The Indians were already very clearly not putting a foot on the escalator ladder.
Karan Thapar: Let's go one step further. Rubio's tweet also says India and Pakistan will start talks on a broad set of issues at a neutral site. Government sources that remain unnamed – not a single government person has actually put his name to it – have specifically tried to contradict that and said any talks will only be about the ceasefire. What do you make of that? Was Rubio revealing more than India is prepared at this stage to make public or is there a fundamental difference between them on this specific issue? Because I'll repeat once again only government sources contradicted it. Not a single government face was prepared to do so.
Shashi Tharoor: Okay, look, I mean, you know the rules of the game as to how much governments are prepared to say on record, how much they're willing to say on background and so on, but I am reasonably certain that India could never have agreed to this.
Let me explain to you why, Karan. For us, the question of granting a negotiating platform to the Pakistanis is a very big deal. Following Balakot, we have simply never agreed. In fact, going back, following Pathankot in January of 2016 when we invited the Pakistanis to come in and join the investigation and they went back and said, 'Oh, the Indians did it to themselves.' Since then, there has been no negotiation of any shape, size or nature between India and Pakistan.
It is far too big a deal for India to grant Pakistan the opportunity to talk and it would have taken a considerable amount of good behavior on the part of Pakistan including for example some concrete action against a prescribed terrorist organisation for India to acknowledge that Pakistan had earned the right to have a negotiation.
Karan Thapar: Why are you saying it?
Shashi Tharoor: I'm saying what we have seen is the opposite from Pakistan. Rather than good behavior, we have seen bad behavior. We've seen the sending of a terrorist group. We've seen the killing of Indian civilians. We would never reward Pakistan with a negotiating.
Karan Thapar: My question stands, if you come up with that answer which you're giving me, are you suggesting that Rubio made it up? Remember it was in a tweet carrying his name and he was explicit. He said that they will start talks on a broad set of issues at a neutral site. He's the Secretary of State of America, a country to whom we have extremely close good relations. Are you saying Rubio made it up?
Shashi Tharoor: All I'm saying is it's entirely possible that in these early stages of the Trump administration that there can be some missteps from Washington. It really would surprise me if such a thing were to be done. It would really surprise me if India said it's possible Pakistan has said that. It's entirely possible that the Pakistanis said this to the Americans and the Americans have agreed. Look, let's wait till 8:00 p.m. tonight when the prime minister is going to be addressing the nation. We'll find out from more authentic sources than you and I are.
Karan Thapar: Oh, well, I think it's unlikely that the prime minister will either confirm what Rubio said or specifically deny it. That would ruin relations with Rubio. The prime minister will almost certainly sidestep the issue. But the issue goes one step further. In a tweet on Sunday, Trump said, and I'm quoting him, 'Additionally, I will work with both of you to see if after a thousand years a solution can be arrived at concerning Kashmir.' How does that reflect on India's traditional position that it will not accept third party intervention between India and Pakistan? Or now is this the product of what you feared – Kashmir being internationalised?
Shashi Tharoor: Look, I'm sorry. This is exactly what I was objecting to in my very first answer to you, that particular post by Mr. Trump on Truth Social. I get the impression that Mr. Trump has not been briefed properly or that he has not absorbed the briefing he's got because on those four grounds that I spelled out for you, Karan, he deviated from established American policy with no good reason to do so. And those were the four grounds I was pointing out to you that really it is not something that an American president had he been properly fully briefed. He hasn't yet got the staff.
Karan Thapar: Trump deviates from established American policy on a range of issues. Ukraine, Russia, Israel, Gaza, tariffs, China, you name it, he deviates.
That's the way he conducts his presidency. And so I come back to the question, if Trump has decided he wants to mediate and intervene, perhaps even personally, maybe he thinks there's a Nobel Peace Prize in the offering for him, what will be our response? Will we say to Trump, 'Forgive me, no, we don't want you.' or will we have to more politely accept his intervention because we don't want to damage relations. We are the ones who are caught in the middle.
Shashi Tharoor: No, I think we'll very very carefully have to explain to Mr. Trump. And by the way, there are sort of grown up and vaccinated people around him who can also explain it to him. He has a designated assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs who's yet to be confirmed by the Senate. A man called S. Paul Kapoor who is partly of Indian origin and who is a very respected scholar on South Asia who's a teacher of strategic studies who understands the nuances of all of this perfectly and I think once he has staff around him who've been confirmed and who understand the issues he is bound to have people to tell him, 'Mr. President I'm sorry this is where you have departed from our policy.'
Karan Thapar: You really believe that his assistant secretary of state will say that when the secretary of state is not prepared to say it. You seriously believe that there are people in the Trump administration who will say to the president of the United States, 'You got it wrong, mister. You need to back off?'
Shashi Tharoor: Well, I think if they don't do that, then I'm afraid Mr. Trump is the one who's going to end up with egg in his face because to save Mr. Trump's amour-propre, we are not going to stand an entire fundamental tenet of Indian foreign policy on its head. We are not going to negotiate with a gun pointed at our head. We're not going to internationalise a Kashmir dispute by sitting at some neutral venue and discussing it with Pakistan and a third party. First of all, we don't even agree there is a dispute. We say that it's merely an internal question how effectively we can integrate Kashmir into the rest of India. And as far as we're concerned…
Karan Thapar: Can I interrupt? All of that would be very convincing if Jaishankar and Doval had gone public to say that to the Indian people. They haven't. They've kept silent completely. So, it's you, a member of the opposition Congress party who speaking out so cogently and coherently. Probably not on their behalf, but nonetheless, you're doing so. The government's silence doesn't suggest that there is more to the story than meets the eye.
Shashi Tharoor: Not necessarily. The government silence could merely suggest that they don't want to cause offense to President Trump and they're conveying a lot of these things privately. Let me say one more thing about my basis for saying all of this. I have understood Indian foreign policy. I've written about Indian foreign policy and I've got a pretty good sense while chairing twice the committee on external affairs of what the broad lines of our policy directions are.
Mine is what you can call an educated and informed opinion. It is not based on classified information. It is not based on briefings from the government. It is based quite simply on what I think our policy is and I might add should be. So as far as I'm concerned if I'm wrong then some other people may also be wrong if they have departed from…
Karan Thapar: Not for a moment do I question your right to speak. Not only are you a former minister of state for external affairs, you also happen to be the present chairman of the parliamentary standing committee on external affairs which gives you…
Shashi Tharoor: We will receive a briefing next week. We have not…
Karan Thapar: Let's move on. I want to slightly broaden the subject. I want to ask you this question. When you look back on operation Sindoor, what has India gained from four days of kinetic action? It's a question former army chief general V. Malik raised on Saturday. No one's bothered to ask him. Let me put that question to you as chairman of the parliamentary committee on external affairs. What have we gained?
Shashi Tharoor: I'll tell you what we've gained in my understanding. What I would say to General Malik who I'm very fond of and who I know well and I think very highly of. If he'd asked me I would have said the same thing. I think what we have gained is that we have sent a very clear signal on the 7th of May. Not the whole four days. The first day our actions were calibrated, calculated and precise. We indicated we would not tolerate Pakistan-backed terrorism on our soil.
We have conveyed the fact that nonetheless as a mature and responsible power we would conduct our response so carefully that we were able in fact to actually hit very precise targets including I'm told a very specific building in the Lashkar compound while minimising collateral damage. We even chose a time where there were not likely to be too many civilians wandering about in these rather congested towns.
But at the same time we have conveyed that each time Pakistan errs like this our level of response goes up and I'll just take you through four things. Just understand what we are trying to convey. 2016 January Pathankot happens. The prime minister invites the Pakistanis to come in and join the investigation. The Pakistanis send their spooks into an Indian air base and they go back and say, 'Oh the Indians did it to themselves.' That was the last straw. We will never trust them again.
September 2016, Uri happens. We cross the first red line. We crossed the LOC by sending a surgical strike across, hit the base from which these guys came. Okay, remember in Kargil in 1999, we had lost lives rather than cross the LOC in reprisal for the Kargil incursion. So the first breach happened in September 2016.
Second, we have Pulwama in January 2019. We hit them with Balakot. Now that's a second breach. We've not just crossed the LOC, we have crossed the IB, the international border.
Third strike, Pahalgam happens. We don't just cross the LOC. We don't just cross the international border. We hit the terrorist bases in the heartland of Pakistani Punjab. We hit populated cities like Bahawalpur and Muridke. We do so carefully. We minimise collateral damage. But we are saying to them, 'Listen guys, the gloves are off. The more you do, we are sending you an unmistakable signal. We are coming after you and we don't care where you are. We will come for you.' Now, this is I think a very very powerful message. It needed to be sent. It was effectively sent.
Karan Thapar: Now, let me come to what happens thereafter. Let me say it jocularly, it's a great shame that the Indian government doesn't have a spokesman as eloquent, as effective, and as in command of the situation as you are because clearly it's the absence of a spokesman that can answer the press's questions that allows the trolls to attack the government as they're doing over the Trump tweets. They need someone like you to forcefully speak for them. They ought really to be asked by them to do it as a favour.
But let me come to the unresolved questions because they are equally important and there are two in particular that I want to raise with you. First, we know that there was a serious intelligence failure that lay behind the Pahalgam terrorist attack coupled with a major security lapse because the Baisaran Meadow was completely unprotected. Now that the ceasefire has happened and is holding, has the time come to inquire into these? And secondly, do the conclusions need to be made public?
Shashi Tharoor: Well, first of all, I think I'd be very surprised if inquiry hadn't already begun. I think that it's in the government's own interest to know what went wrong and to track this down. As far as the time for making it public is concerned, the government will have to take that call. Karan, if I were in the government, I would say the same thing. I'm in the opposition. I tend to say the same thing. The government will have to decide.
First of all, there may be lapses within our internal mechanism, the revelation of which would reveal vital information gathering techniques and sources that we cannot afford to compromise. And national security to my mind is something that warrants a certain amount of circumspection.
Second, we still want to track down the four individuals, three of whom have been identified by name who we know were involved in the Pahalgam killings. In my view, I wouldn't take out a life insurance policy on any of those characters, but I would like it if we could capture any of them alive in order to get to the bottom of who sent them, who trained them, who financed them, who equipped them, and who gave them the chilling orders to behave the way they did when they killed the people, the tourists and Baisaran.
So I want ideally the government to be giving that the first priority and I'm hoping, I mean I don't know Mr. Doval's modus operandi but I'm hoping that this is very high on his agenda that we are still tracking these guys down. They're almost certainly in Pakistan but it doesn't matter. We have to find out where they are to find out where they're hiding. We have to flush them out and we have to get them. Ideally we should bring them to justice. Failing that I'm afraid we'll have to take other kinds of extreme action but the fact is these are unfinished tasks. It's not that the crisis is over.
Karan Thapar: Let me come to something that's much more important. How do you view reports that Pakistan has shot down Indian planes? First the Hindu carried a tweet citing Indian officials accepting that three planes had possibly been shot down. Then Reuters carried a report citing two US officials claiming two planes had been shot down. Finally, CNN carried a report citing a French intelligence official claiming at least one Rafale plane had been shot down and that they were checking to see whether there were more. As chairman of the parliamentary standing committee on external affairs, how do you respond to these reports?
Shashi Tharoor: Well, first of all, I think the committee has sought a briefing and it has been granted for next week. It's when we get that briefing that we will have an authoritative answer. Secondly, I do believe the government at some point will owe an accounting to the Indian people. Whether they do it in parliament, whether they do it to a parliamentary committee, whether they do it to the mass media, I don't know. But at some point, it's not healthy for all these rumours as you said yourself in your question Karan. They are all mutually contradictory. Was it one plane? Was it two planes? Was it three planes? Was it the Rafale? Was it something else?
You know, we have a fairly extensive flotilla as it were in the air. There's MiGs, there's Sukhois, there's Mirages, and there's Rafale. So, in fact, there's a whole range of aircraft that could have been affected. All I was reassured to see in yesterday's statement from the MOD was that all the pilots are back home safe. So, if at all…
Karan Thapar: Hang on a second, hang on a second. You're only partially quoting not the DGMO but the DGAO, that's director general air operations air marshal Bharti. I'm going to quote precisely what he said because I think a partial quotation is unfair to the audience. His words were 'Losses are a part of combat.' I'll repeat that again. 'Losses are a part of combat.' And then he added, 'As for details, I would not like to comment on that because we are still in a combat situation. All I can say is all our pilots are back safe.' And to my mind, and I'm now asking you this as a question, is that an admission that planes were lost, but the pilots are safe? That seems to be a possible implication.
Shashi Tharoor: And that's why I think it's healthy for the government to come clean at the appropriate time. Karan, the ceasefire is barely held for 24 hours. So, let's give it enough time. Let's let the government come to the decision of when it should go public. We don't want to undermine the morale of our armed forces in any shape or form.
But I think the widespread implication is obviously that we lost perhaps one aircraft, perhaps more, that we lost them on our side of the border perhaps to incoming missile fire from the other side and that the pilots ejected to safety in Indian territory. Those would seem to be reasonable conclusions that one could draw from the statement. But I for one am not planning to repeat any such conclusion until and unless I know from the government authoritatively what the exact numbers and circumstances are.
Karan Thapar: That's the key issue. We need to hear from our government authoritatively and the government has a duty and responsibility to speak to the Indian people because we are a democracy. The prime minister claims we are the mother of democracy. He boasts we are the biggest in the world. Now six days have passed since the first reports that Pakistan has shot down Indian planes emerged. During that period the reports have proliferated. They've been broadcast by BBC verified by CNN by Reuters by AP Indian papers like the Hindu picked it up. The Tribune picked it up. The Indian Express picked it up. Clearly there are too many people picking up the story for it to be ignored and simply treated in silence or responded to with cryptic answers. And the question I want to ask you is this. Is it wise and discreet not to say anything for six days or is it shortsighted and damaging of credibility? Which of the two?
Shashi Tharoor: Neither. I think it's a question of the government having to make a judgment as to when is the right time to do this. In the middle of an ongoing war, you don't trumpet your own setbacks. That's common sense. It would be bad for morale. It would be bad for the fighting spirit. It would also be bad for the public attitude of support.
But once the things have come down as they now have to apparently a state of calm, those considerations matter less and I would certainly be hoping that the government will come to a conclusion at some point to give an accounting to the Indian people. Remember that we are normally a country where even if a training jet crashes somewhere and a pilot is killed, it's in the news the next day. It's not that we are a country that suppresses this kind of information.
I understand the desire of the government not to go public at wartime. And I'm therefore prepared to wait patiently for when they think the right time is. But I am convinced that of course they will take us into confidence.
Karan Thapar: Well let's hope so because bizarrely at the military press briefing held yesterday evening Ash Bharti who's the director general air operations claimed that we've downed and I'm quoting him 'a few Pakistani planes' but refused to say how many though he added he knew the number. Now at a time when the government and air force refused to speak about how many of our own planes have been shot down even though the world is speaking about it and raising worrying questions about it, what do you make of this sudden surprise claim? It's suddenly been thrown into the mix. And by the way, it wasn't part of the formal statement made by Air Marshal Bharti. It was very much a response to a question which means that if the question hadn't been asked, he'd never have said this. So, what do you make about this subtle surprise claim? Because it's mystifying.
Shashi Tharoor: Your guess is as good as mine, Karan. And your guess is probably better than mine since you've been in the business of asking questions and eliciting answers for far longer than I have. All I can say is that as far as Pakistan is concerned, there's no reason for us to believe that there wasn't damage done there as well. I don't have the details. You don't have the details. And the Pakistanis have also so far not revealed any details.
It's no accident really that neither side has gone public for the exact same reasons I gave you. In the middle of a fighting war, no one likes to admit their setbacks. But I think at some point we will give an accounting to the Indian people and at some point I hope the Pakistanis will do so as well.
It is something we must understand that when we had this horrible incident with China and Galwan, we were the first country to reveal that we incurred 20 deaths. To this day, have you seen an authoritative statement from the Chinese about how many people they lost? We know that four or five of their soldiers, wounded soldiers, were honoured by the Chinese at a public function. They have never ever issued a statement saying in the Galwan incident what number of casualties the Chinese incurred. Some systems are different. China is not a democracy.
I would like to think that India as a democracy will come clean in due course in the fullness of time and at the appropriate moment.
Karan Thapar: Let me ask you as chairman of the parliamentary standing committee on external affairs one more question about the planes being shot down. I want to draw your attention to what the editor of Force magazine Pravin Sawhney said to me in an interview on Friday. The same logic and the same argument has been reported by the British paper the Telegraph. It's also been reported by CNN and by other niche magazines. Pravin said, 'The combination of the Chinese-made J10C aircraft and Chinese-made PL-15 missiles gives the Pakistani air force a distinct advantage. And it's possible that Indian Air Force planes could be vulnerable because they may not realise that they're within what he called the missiles and radar's target envelope.' Now, as chairman of the standing committee, how do you respond to that possibility?
Shashi Tharoor: Well, that actually would be a different standing committee, Karan. It would be the standing committee on defense that would discuss that. I'm not a military expert, and I dare say that Mr. Sawhney is, and therefore he may well know what he's talking about.
I follow the media as many others do and we do know that following such reports that apparently the stocks of the Chengdu company that makes the J-10 aircraft have shot up in value and the stocks of Dassault that makes the Rafale have dropped which may or may not speak to how accurate the market is engaging in the consequences of military conflict. But it strikes me as a rather ghoulish yardstick by which to judge human life and the consequences of war.
Nonetheless, you know, I don't think the people sitting in New Delhi in the government are going to be oblivious to all of this. There will certainly be postmortems taking place. They always are. How much of that is to be made public? While you and I as Democrats might like to see a lot more of this in the public domain, I think it's not surprising that in every government, some things are kept confidential for a significant period of time.
I did think that the Henderson Brooks report on the 62 war could have been declassified a lot earlier than it finally was. But I can understand why for some period of time while these considerations are still active India would want a certain amount of secrecy. So for example if Pravin Sawhney is right would we gain in any way by advertising to the Chinese and the Pakistanis that we think that they are, you know, ready to steamroller over our Air Force . Of course not.
Karan Thapar: Don't you think they already know it?
Shashi Tharoor: No.
Karan Thapar: Don't you think they already know it? Pravin Sawhney is not advertising to anyone. He's simply informing the Indian people. The Chinese and the Pakistanis and those who are in the defense business already know it if it's true.
Shashi Tharoor: If it's true , I want to underscore that point. If it's true, we don't know that it is. But should the Indian people be taken into confidence and told what the actual conclusion is whenever the inquiry is done? I think we should be taken into confidence about whether we have lost aircraft, whether we've lost human lives, whether we've lost soldiers. I mean that's normal stuff. I think we should definitely do that in a democracy.
After all, we'll be sending coffins home to villages if that is true and we may as well go public about that and give awards where gallantry has been demonstrated in the line of duty. But I am not calling and I would not call for any confidential assessment to be made public that could in any way handicap our armed forces in the next crisis or the next conflict.
Karan Thapar: Okay, let's come to one last issue. No country called out Pakistan by name. Is that because India didn't have or because India didn't make public convincing evidence of Pakistan's involvement in Pahalgam? Earlier the New York Times reported that many ambassadors who'd been briefed by foreign secretary Misri felt that India was relying on what had happened in the past to prove Pakistan's role in Pahalgam. And to put it bluntly, they weren't convinced. Is that why no one really called out Pakistan by name?
Shashi Tharoor: Possibly. Because the fact of the matter is that Pakistan really specializes in denial. They've done so right from the very beginning of their bleeding India by a thousand cuts. They denied every single thing they could. They denied 26/11 until Kasab was caught alive and they had to admit he was one of theirs. They denied knowing where Osama bin Laden was until he was found in Abbottabad.
Why is it surprising that they would deny their iniquity? It is to assume that they won't embrace their iniquity. They will deny it. They have to. That's precisely why we treat their denials as worth precisely very very little.
Karan Thapar: Now, are you worried that the world did not accept our position more readily? That's the question.
Shashi Tharoor: Having said all of that, if we capture dead or alive and as I said, I hope alive one of these criminals who executed innocent civilians and tourists on the 22nd of April, I have no doubt we will be able to trace the very connection that Pakistan is busy denying. Number one.
Number two, it's like saying we have a serial killer in the neighborhood who we know has conducted 22 other murders. There is a 23rd that has all the same footprints, the same fingerprints, the same sort of signs, but he denies he did it. Are we to take him seriously? I'm sorry, Karan. That is my view of this. We've had a serial killer on the loose in our neighbourhood.He has conducted one more killing, but he is denying it. And right now, we don't have the specific evidence to connect this killing to his earlier killings. Circumstantially, the evidence is there.
For a forensic case of law, we don't have one. If that's what ambassadors want, well, fair enough. They can demand it and say they haven't got it. But I'm proud that at least three countries, France, Russia, and Israel, explicitly said that they understand and defend India's right to defend itself. They did not specifically say that they're blaming Pakistan. True. But they said that India has every right to take action to defend its territory against terrorism and defend its people against terror and that's what India has done which by implication I think is as far as they could have gone.
Karan Thapar: Finally, as a former minister of state for external affairs, do you believe this ceasefire will hold or when India says any future act of terror will be a declaration of war, does that suggest that the ceasefire is only going to be shortlived ?
Shashi Tharoor: No, I think the intention on our side is for the ceasefire to hold for all sorts of reasons. Above all the fact is, as I've repeatedly told foreign interviewers, what I can repeat to you, I think we are a status quo power. We have no desire to change or upset the geopolitics of the subcontinent. We want to be left alone to grow and focus on our economy and the well-being of our people. We do not… correct. We do claim the right to take back the whole of what we call POK. So, we're not completely status quo. That's one part of the status quo we want reversed. That's in my personal view the kind of position you keep in order to have something to give away.
I have no idea what we're going to do with POK which thanks to Pakistani demographic policies in the last 77 years is today 99% Punjabi Pakistani Muslim and not Kashmiri. Most of the Kashmiris who originally inhabited POK are sitting in Birmingham or Leicester and not in Muzaffarpur anymore. So I mean the truth of the matter is it's an overwhelmingly Punjabi Pakistani place. I don't know what we do with it. But that's not the point.
The point is we have never lifted a finger even to act on that claim. And when we did take part of that territory in the wars of '65 for example we returned it to the Pakistanis. This is not the action of a country that is lusting for Pakistani territory. What we are very clearly all about is maintaining the status quo. We want the Pakistanis to leave us alone.
So I have no doubt that India is serious about maintaining the ceasefire. I equally do not doubt that there are people in Pakistan, malign elements associated with the ISI and the military and those perhaps beyond the control of the ISI and the military who would like nothing more than to trigger another war and who might want to conduct a terrorist operation in India in order to achieve that result.
Which is why I hope that our people are doing their very best to maintain security at the highest alert that we will never be complacent again as briefly we were in Pulwama, that we will actually maintain protection for all areas and places particularly in Kashmir where terrorists could strike and having maintained that security that we will thereby ensure the kind of peace that will enable us to grow. If however there is a terrorist attack, I agree with you that India is very serious about taking it one notch above the 7th of May.
Karan Thapar: Let me pick up what you said in that answer that there are organisations possibly even partly to do with the Pakistani state that are looking to create trouble and mischief for India and I'm putting it deliberately euphemistically who could easily at the drop of a hat launch another terror strike. In that case, was it wise to declare that every act of terror will be a declaration of war? Isn't there a danger that we're making ourselves hostage to every terrorist? And secondly, doesn't it—let me finish. And secondly, doesn't it place our army in a permanent state of alert?
Shashi Tharoor: Well, in the short term, they are on alert and they'll have to be. But on your first question, can we allow ourselves to be hostage to any madman who wants to set off a bomb somewhere in Lajpat Nagar market tomorrow? And let that drag us into a war we don't want to fight. The short answer is no.
I think what we were, what we are saying essentially to the Pakistanis those in a position to listen is that if we see evidence of a strike that required the kind of meticulous planning, organization, intelligence work, equipment, finance and escape routes that we saw in Pulwama which clearly shows a very professional imprint and very detailed reconnaissance and planning, then we will put two and two together and conclude that that came from official sources and we will react accordingly.
I think what we will also not do is if some looney bin comes and blows himself up in a public spot in India, we will see that for what it is and we will not necessarily drag the entire country into a war. We will obviously have people trained and qualified in Delhi to make that judgment.
Not you and me in a TV studio Karan but people who study intelligence intercepts who have a good sense of where something came from.
Even on that behalf by the way one of the suspicions I have is we do have evidence we cannot share with the world because it comes from intelligence intercepts so I suspect we do have the evidence. It bears all the hallmarks of a very very carefully planned operation, this is not some couple of bearded fanatics in an attic who planned this, it's been done very very seriously.
But be that as it may, I think we will have to rely upon our government to have the judgment to decide when a terror attack is an act of war and when a terror attack is simply a misguided act of a crazy individual. And we will act I believe responsibly. India is a responsible power even on May 7th. As I said, we conducted ourselves in a remarkably responsible and restrained way and I applaud the government for that and I hope that we will always be able to show that face of ourselves to the terrorist community.
Karan Thapar: Thank you very much for the time you've given me. Thank you very much for addressing all the issues that I raised. Take care. Stay safe.
Shashi Tharoor: Thank you Karan. All the best.
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