EAM slams ‘bad neighbours’, says India has right to defend

India’s relations with neighbouring countries are guided by their behaviour and New Delhi has the right to defend the country’s citizens when a “bad neighbour” decides to deliberately and persistently continue supporting terrorism, external affairs minister S Jaishankar said on Friday, referring to Pakistan.

- Rezaul H Laskar

Jaishankar criticised the detention by Chinese authorities of an Indian national from Arunachal Pradesh while she was transiting through Shanghai airport last November, and said such tactics will not change the reality of the northeastern state being a part of India. He also spoke about India’s response to other developments in the neighbourhood, such as political instability in Bangladesh, while participating in an interaction with students of the Indian Institute of Technology (1IT)-Madras in Chennai.

India’s ties with its neighbours, he said, are based on common sense and New Delhi has invested, helped and shared whenever countries displayed good neighbourliness. “But you can also have bad neighbours...Now, when you have bad neighbours, and if you look to the one to the west, if a country decides they will deliberately, persistently, unrepentantly continue with terrorism, we have a right to defend our people against terrorism,” he said in a reference to Pakistan.

“How we exercise that right is up to us. Nobody can tell us what we should do or not. We will do whatever we have to do to defend ourselves. It’s a common sense proposition,” he said, ina reference to Operation Sindoor, launched on May 7 last year to target terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan in retaliation for the Pahalgam terror attack carried out by a proxy of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) in April.