We must be vigilant about separating national interest from political interest: Tharoor

In a candid conversation, author, diplomat, and Member of Parliament Dr. Shashi Tharoor lays bare his thoughts on Operation Sindoor, the evolving idea of India, the threat of religious majoritarianism, and the promise of inclusive nationalism.

- PRIYA SAHGAL

Equal parts intellectual discourse and impassioned warning, this is Tharoor at his most unfiltered.

Q: Can you highlight some of the bizarre claims you've had to address recently?

A: No, I think that the challenges, frankly, with many of our external friends is that they seem to be very susceptible to Pakistan's pleas of innocence. Pakistan saying, look, we didn't do anything. Where's the proof that we did Pahalgam? The Indians are just attacking us for no good reason. They're a rogue state. I mean this kind of talk and most sensible people understand that when you've had a state next door to you that has time after time committed terrorist attacks every time tried to deny it then their denials have been shredded when the truth has come out.

Naturally the finger of suspicion is bound to point to them. But for some reason there are some countries that are perpetually willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. And that's why I think we have to constantly explain why it is that we have every reason to do what we did. And even then what we did was extremely carefully calibrated. And I pointed out to people not only did we only strike the terror bases, we did so at 1:30 in the morning when there were hardly likely to be any civilians around. So there would be minimal collateral damage and we did so while carefully avoiding hitting any governmentor military installations.

Not because we believe the Pakistani military is innocent. Far from it. We believe the Pakistani military is very much complicit.

But we didn't want to give them an excuse for a broader larger war. We said we are showing you we are only reacting to terrorism. Now it so happened that the Pakistanis decided they would react in a broader spectrum.