'No terror bases in India, so Pakistani army hit civilian areas': Shashi Tharoor on conflict's asymmetry

Tharoor, who is the Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs, made the comments during an interaction in the US where he led a multi-party delegation of MPs as part of India's global diplomatic outreach after Operation Sindoor.

He said the Pakistani military targeted civilian areas in India as "there are no terror bases in India to hit".

"... All I can say is that the world of warfare has been changing dramatically since the beginning of the Ukraine conflict, and increasingly the use of drones, for example. It's striking that neither country [India and Pakistan] actually crossed over into the other's airspace at any stage of these four days [of the conflict]. Everything is being done from a distance now. Drones, missiles, technologies have moved quite significantly," Tharoor said at a discussion hosted by the think tank Council on Foreign Relations.

"What was old fashioned and awful and tragic was the indiscriminate Pakistani artillery shelling, which should never have been done in the manner it was. I mean, but you can understand why. We hit terror bases. There are no terror bases in India to hit. There are no terrorist organizations in India listed in the UN or the State Department or anywhere else. So what do you hit? You hit civilians," he said.

"You hit innocent people. That is the asymmetry of this particular conflict. We have tried not just to be precise and calibrated in our response, but we have tried systematically to signal we are not interested in war with Pakistan. We're not interested in attacking Pakistani civilians or ordinary people. This is about India versus terrorism," Tharoor said.

He questioned why Pakistan doesn't close its doors to providing safe havens for terrorists if it does not want to be hit.

"And as far as we're concerned, situating the problem where it belongs is, if you don't want places in your territory to be hit because they're housing terrorists, why don't you shut down the safe havens? Why don't you arrest these leaders? Why don't you close their bank accounts? Why don't you disband these organizations or call them illegal? If you're not prepared to do any of that, then I'm afraid this is the only way we can deal with it, because we are not going to sit back at our homes and be hit at your convenience. That's not going to happen," Tharoor added.

India launched Operation Sindoor on May 7 in response to the recent terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir's Pahalgam, which left 26 people, mostly non-Muslim tourists, killed.

India targeted seven terrorist hubs in Pakistan and PoK on May 7.

Pakistan launched drone and missile attacks on several Indian cities which were neutralised by the Indian Armed Forces.