S Jaishankar said “nobody can tell us what we should or should not do”.
New Delhi: Delivering a stringent message to Pakistan, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Friday termed Pakistan a ‘bad neighbour’, saying that India has all the right to defend its people against terrorism. While addressing students at the Indian Institute of Technology, the External Affairs Minister, in reference to Operation Sindoor, stated that “nobody can tell us what we should or should not do.”
“You can also have bad neighbours. Unfortunately, we do. When you have bad neighbours, if you look to the one to the west, if a country decides that it will deliberately, persistently, and unrepentantly continue with terrorism, we have a right to defend our people against terrorism. We will exercise that right,” Jaishankar said.
“How we exercise that right is up to us. Nobody can tell us what we should or should not do. We will do whatever we have to do to defend ourselves,” he added.
Operation Sindoor
It is to be noted that India, in 2024, conducted its Operation Sindoor in which Indian Defence Forces targeted terror hideouts in located in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir in order to take revenge of terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam in April last year. The attack was perpetrated by The Resistance Front, a proxy of Pakistan-based terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).
Indus Waters Treaty
Jaishankar also spoked about the ongoing issue of the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), which was suspended after the Pahalgam attack.
He said, “Many years ago, we agreed to a water-sharing arrangement, but if you had decades of terrorism, there is no good neighbourliness. If there is no good neighbourliness, you don’t get the benefits of that good neighbourliness. You can’t say, “Please share water with me, but I will continue terrorism with you.”
He sarcastically started India is blessed with “a lot of neighbours of various kinds”.
“If you have a neighbour who is good to you or at least who is not harmful to you, your natural instinct is to be kind, to help that neighbour, and that’s what we do as a country,” he said.
Last month in December, the EAM that that “much of India’s problems” emanate from the Pak army.
