New Delhi : Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, who is leading a multi-party delegation to five countries, on Friday expressed disappointment over the Colombian government’s condolence message for Pakistani casualties after India’s Operation Sindoor, insisting there is no moral equivalence between terrorists and those defending their nation. “We will say to our friends in Colombia, there can be no equivalence between those who dispatch terrorists and those who resist them. There can be no equivalence between those who attack and those who defend. We are only exercising our right of self-defence, and if there is any misunderstanding here on this core, we are here to dispel any such misunderstanding. We’re very happy to talk to Colombia in some detail about the circumstances,” Thaoor added.
Tharoor stressed that India’s action was a legitimate self-defence measure following a brutal terror attack on civilians in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam claimed by The Resistance Front — a Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) offshoot based in Pakistan.”We’re very happy to talk to Colombia in some detail about the circumstances. Just as Colombia has endured many terror attacks, so have we in India. We have endured a very large number of attacks for almost four decades,” Thaoor said.
Tharoor said, “We are here looking for understanding… We have the impression that perhaps the situation was not fully understood when that one statement (Colombia extending condolences for deaths in Pakistan after Indian strikes on terror hotbeds) was made. Understanding is extremely important for us. We are a country which has really been a force for constructive progress in the world”. “We certainly hope that other governments will tell those who give safe haven and protection to terrorists to stop doing so. That would be very helpful indeed, as well in the Security Council or outside it,” the Congress leader added.
Shashi Tharoor dismissed speculation about third-party mediation in the recent cross-border tensions between India and Pakistan, asserting that there was no formal conversation involving India. “We received a number of phone calls from senior United States officials and also from senior officials of other countries (France, UAE, Saudi Arabia). And the message we gave to all these countries was exactly the same. We are not interested in war. We were just doing retribution for a terrorist attack. If they stop, we stop,” he said.
“Certainly there was no sort of active process of mediation that we are aware of. Certainly nothing involving us, because we never intended to begin with from the very first day when the anti-terror strikes took place on the night of May 7. We are not the belligerent power in this particular equation,” he added.