‘Will respond if there is another terror attack’The EAM also discussed the Modi government’s policy that India will respond to attacks like the April 22 Pahalgam incident. He said India targeted terrorist sites listed by the United Nations and showed the list to the journalist.Jaishankar noted that the Pakistani military chose to fire on India following India’s attacks on terror sites, and India responded to their attack. He stated that India’s strikes on Pakistani airbases and air defence systems on May 10 compelled their military to accept that the two nations needed to stop firing on each other.Outlining India’s approach to counter-terrorism, the EAM said ‘Operation Sindoor’ is continuing and India will respond if there is another terror attack like the one at Pahalgam, targeting terrorists operating from Pakistan. “What happened was, after the terrorists struck, it was imperative that we have a response because lack of response you understand was impossible in such a situation,” he said.The journalist noted, “It has been tried in the past, not to respond.”Jaishankar replied, “And we have seen the results. So, our government has been very clear. Okay, I accept that may not be the policy of the earlier government. But, our government is very clear, if there is such an attack, there will be response. The response was there, the response targeted these nine places, where the terrorist centres, as I said, they are all, the places are all shown in the UN list, I mean this is where the terrorists work and live and operate from.”Elaborating on India’s response following Pakistani military action, he said, “After that, the Pakistani military chose to fire on us and we responded, this went on four days and after that, the decisive day was the 10th of May. On the morning of 10th May, in response to an attack which they had launched on us earlier that morning, we had hit eight airbases. We basically made these bases non-functional, you know, we hit their runways, we hit their command centres.””This is the kind of, you hit a runway, you make the airbase non-operational or you went after what is an air-defence command control system, this is the airbase close to Rawalpindi. That I think compelled the Pakistani military to accept that we need to stop firing at each other. At the moment, there is no firing and there has been some repositioning of forces accordingly,” he told NOS.
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