Nearly three weeks after the end of a brief but brutal India-Pakistan war, New Delhi on Monday warned that the root causes of the conflict remain unchanged — and that India stands ready to strike anywhere in Pakistan if provoked by terrorist attacks.
“It [Pakistan] is a country very steeped in its use of terrorism as an instrument of state policy. That is the whole issue,” Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar told POLITICO during a visit to Brussels.
Asked if the conditions that led to the outbreak of war last month were still in place, he said: “If you call the commitment to terrorism a source of tension, absolutely, it is.”
Conflict broke out in early May after India accused Pakistan of sponsoring a terrorist attack that killed 26 civilians, mainly Hindus, in an Indian-administered region. Pakistan has denied sponsoring terrorism.
Following days of tit-for-tat missile and aerial strikes that prompted widespread alarm about the potential for further escalation between the two nuclear-armed powers, India and Pakistan declared a ceasefire on May 10.
Both sides declared victory, but their reports on how the war unfolded differed. India initially denied claims that Pakistan had shot down as many as six of its fighter jets, but a senior Indian military official later acknowledged that India had indeed lost planes — without specifying how many or what type.
Images of wreckage posted on social media suggest that one Mirage jet and one Rafale jet, both French-made fighters, had been destroyed. U.S. and French officials have told several media outlets that Pakistan was able to down at least one French-made jet with Chinese technology.
Pressed to clarify what had happened, Jaishankar didn’t deny the destruction of Indian Air Force planes, but said the appropriate authorities would communicate on the matter when ready.
In some of the most pointed comments by an Indian official since a ceasefire was declared, he argued that India’s fighter planes and missiles had inflicted far more extensive damage on the Pakistani Air Force than vice versa, forcing Pakistan to sue for peace.
“As far I’m concerned, how effective the Rafale was or frankly, how effective other systems were — to me the proof of the pudding are the destroyed and disabled airfields on the Pakistani side,” he said.
“The fighting stopped on the 10th for one reason and one reason only, which was that on the 10th morning we hit these eight Pakistani, the main eight Pakistani airfields and disabled them.”
“And don’t take my word for it, these are images which are available in Google. You can look at those runways and those hangars which have taken the hit,” he added.
Jaishankar, who was in Brussels for high-level trade talks with the European Union, further asserted that Pakistan was training “thousands” of terrorists “in the open” and “unleashing” them on its southern neighbor.
“We are not going to live with it. So our message to them is that if you continue to do the kind of barbaric acts which they did in April, then there is going to be retribution, and that retribution will be against the terrorist organizations and the terrorist leadership.”
“And we don’t care where they are. If they are deep in Pakistan, we will go deep into Pakistan,” he added.
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