New York, May 26 — A senior Indian lawmaker warned on Sunday that Pakistan would face consequences for any future cross-border terror attacks, asserting New Delhi’s right to self-defence during a visit to the United States aimed at galvanizing support against terrorism emanating from its western neighbor.
Speaking at an event hosted by the Consulate General of India in New York, Shashi Tharoor, head of India’s Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs, said: “No 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. There will be a price to pay — and that price has been going up systematically.”
Tharoor, who led an all-party delegation of Indian parliamentarians, cited a series of high-profile terror incidents, including the 2016 Pathankot airbase attack, the 2016 Uri attack, and the 2019 Pulwama bombing that killed 40 Indian paramilitary personnel. Each attack, he said, was met with escalated Indian responses — from surgical strikes across the Line of Control (LoC) to air strikes deep inside Pakistani territory in Balakot.
India, he noted, had crossed not just the LoC but also the International Border during the Balakot strikes. “We hit Pakistan in the heartland — not out of interest in war, but to send a clear message about terror,” Tharoor said.
The delegation included lawmakers from across the political spectrum, including the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Congress, Shiv Sena, Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), and the Telugu Desam Party (TDP), as well as former Indian Ambassador to the United States Taranjit Singh Sandhu.
Tharoor described the recent conflict as an “88-hour war” and said India was operating under a “new normal” in which terrorist provocations would be met with firm retaliation. “We are determined now that there has to be a new bottom line to this,” he said.
India’s attempts to use diplomatic channels and international forums had yielded little progress, Tharoor added, citing repeated denials from Pakistan and lack of tangible action against terror groups operating on its soil.
Referencing the April 22 terror attack in Pahalgam, Jammu and Kashmir, Tharoor pointed to a group called The Resistance Front (TRF), which claimed responsibility shortly after the incident. Indian authorities have long maintained that TRF is a proxy for Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) — a UN-designated terror organization with links to Pakistan’s security establishment.
“The culpability lies not just with the four or five killers but with those who financed, trained, and directed them,” Tharoor said, adding that the LeT operates from a sprawling 200-acre campus in Pakistan’s Punjab province. He also criticized China for helping Pakistan remove TRF’s name from a draft statement of condemnation in the United Nations Security Council.
Tharoor emphasized that India’s actions were not driven by a desire for conflict. “We would much rather be left alone. We have no desire to have anything that Pakistan has,” he said. “But if they pursue terror as a state policy, we will respond.”
Tourism and economic activity in Kashmir had shown strong signs of revival prior to the Pahalgam incident, he added, calling the attack a blow to the process of normalization in the region. India, he said, had demonstrated its capability to respond to terror “with precision and restraint,” underscoring that “self-defence is not irresponsibility.”
