There’ll be a price to pay: Tharoor’s message to Pak from US
Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, who is leading a multi-party Indian delegation to five countries, including the US, delivered a strong message to Pakistan on Saturday, warning that there would be a “price to pay” for perpetrating terrorism.
Tharoor emphasised that India has no interest in war with Pakistan and would prefer to focus on growing its bustling economy. However, he said, a new norm is being established.
“No one sitting in Pakistan is going to be allowed to believe they can just walk across the border and kill Indian citizens with impunity. There will be a price to pay,” Tharoor said.
He was speaking to prominent members of the Indian-American community and thought leaders at an event hosted by the Consulate General of India in New York on Saturday (local time).
Referring to the recent terror attack in Pahalgam, Tharoor said India’s message to Pakistan was clear — it did not want to initiate hostilities.
The former minister added that India is now determined to set a new bottom line in response to the pattern of cross-border terrorism emanating from Pakistan.
“Over the years, India has tried everything from giving international dossiers, complaints to the sanctions committee, diplomacy. Pakistan has remained in denial. There has been absolutely no conviction, no prosecution of terrorists, no attempt to dismantle the terror infrastructure in that country and the continued presence of safe havens. So from our point of view, this is it,” said Tharoor, who is leading the delegation to the US, Guyana, Panama, Brazil and Colombia, where the Indian leaders will give a message of zero tolerance to terrorism.
Tharoor, who has faced the ire of his own party for instantly accepting to be on the government’s outreach tour after Operation Sindoor, said he was “not working for the government and personally believed after the Pahalgam attack that India should hit hard and smart which is what it did”.
“So the message (to Pakistan) is that you do this, you’re going to get it back. And we have demonstrated with Operation Sindoor that we can do it with a degree of precision and with a degree of restraint that the world, we hope, will understand,” he said, adding that India was well within its rights to defend itself and has simply exercised that right after 26 civilians were killed on the basis of their religious denomination with the objective of fomenting communal tensions in India.
“We have not done anything irresponsibly. That’s really the message I wanted to give you all today,” Tharoor noted.
Recalling the shocking sequence of events related to the attack and the Indian military response, Tharoor also spoke of how LeT proxy The Resistance Front (TRF) claimed responsibility for the attack before retracting.
“India had gone to the UN Sanctions Committee with information about TRF in 2023 and 2024 and now sadly they acted in 2025. Pakistan with the help of China succeeded in removing the reference to the TRF in the press statement drafted by the UN Security Council two days later,” said Tharoor.
The Indian delegation, in an expression of solidarity, made the 9/11 memorial their first stop in the US with Tharoor declaring that “terrorism is a global problem which the world must fight united and as one”.
The Tharoor-led delegation comprising Sarfaraz Ahmad (JMM), Ganti Harish Madhur Balayogi (TDP), Shashank Mani Tripathi (BJP), Bhubaneswar Kalita (BJP), Milind Deora (Shiv Sena), Tejasvi Surya (BJP) and India’s former Ambassador to the US Taranjit Singh Sandhu left for Guyana on Sunday and would return to the US on June 3.
