India will defend against ‘bad neighbours’ supporting terror, says Jaishankar

NEW  young delhi:  republic of india’s dealings with neighbouring countries ar guided by their behaviour and New Delhi has the right to defend the country’s citizens when a “bad neighbour” such as Pakistan decides to deliberately and persistently continue supporting terrorism, external affairs minister S Jaishankar said on Friday.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 (IIT)-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 reference to Pakistan.Also Read: The Year That Was | A world less predictable“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, in a 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).Following the killing of 26 civilians in Pahalgam, India also suspended the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960. Jaishankar said New Delhi had agreed to the water-sharing arrangement with Islamabad as a gesture of goodwill.“But if you had decades of terrorism, there is no good neighbourliness. If there is no good neighbourliness, you don’t get the benefits of that good neighborliness,” he said. “You can’t say, please share water with me, but I will continue terrorism with you. That’s not reconcilable.”Jaishankar responded to a question from a student from Arunachal Pradesh about the detention of Pema Wangjom Thongdok, a woman from the northeastern state, at Shanghai airport in November, saying the Indian side had protested about the incident to China.“We also made the point that there are two issues – by doing this kind of thing, nothing is going to change in reality. Arunachal Pradesh is and will always be part of India,” he said.“But there is a larger issue – there are international conventions and regulations which govern the transit of people and we expect countries to abide by it. I think this is an issue where we have a very firm and a very clear stance,” he added.Jaishankar, who travelled to Bangladesh on Wednesday to represent India at the funeral of former premier Khaleda Zia amid unprecedented strains in bilateral relations, said he had taken a message to Dhaka that India’s growth is a lifting tide that can benefit all its neighbours. “They are right now heading for their elections. We wish them well in that election, and we hope that once things settle down, the sense of neighbourliness in this region will grow,” he said.While in Dhaka, Jaishankar had handed over a letter from Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Khaleda’s son and leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), Tarique Rahman, that spoke about a “new beginning” and the enrichment of the partnership between the two countries.The Indian side’s outreach is significant as the BNP is expected to emerge as the single largest party in Bangladesh’s election scheduled for February 12.Jaishankar also spoke about the work done by India under its “Neighbourhood First” policy, such as providing the first shipment of vaccines to most neighbours during the Covid-19 pandemic, and helping with food, fuel and fertilisers when the Ukraine conflict triggered a shortage of these commodities. He also pointed to the economic package of $4 billion provided to Sri Lanka when it was grappling with a financial crisis in 2022-23, and assistance in the aftermath of the country being devastated by cyclone Ditwah.“It doesn’t have to be a crisis. You also work with neighbours [through] power grids, waterways, roads, ports, by doing business, by helping tourism, by having people come for medical treatment,” he said.Jaishankar also responded to a question from an Afghan student about resuming visas and scholarships for Afghanistan, saying that the two countries have long-standing relations that have witnessed ups and downs.“We need to address some of the challenges because Afghanistan is going through a very difficult time…from…a people-centric or a societal-centric perspective. When we work with Afghanistan on development issues, on issues like vaccines or food or even pesticides, these kinds of things help,” he said.