Three teams to leave with India’s anti-terror message today; here’s their brief

The all-party delegations that will visit 33 countries over the two weeks to “project India’s national consensus and resolute approach to combating terrorism” will carry with them dossiers detailing Pakistan’s long history of nurturing terrorists and exporting terror to India and other parts of the world.

The delegations will also assert that India’s strikes on nine terror hotspots in Pakistan and Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, codenamed Operation Sindoor, was “not an act of escalation but a restrained retaliatory response” to the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack which only targeted the terrorist infrastructure that has long found a safe haven in Pakistan.

The delegations will also explain to lawmakers, civil society groups and policy think tanks in these countries India’s reasons for placing the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) in abeyance and other diplomatic measures taken by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government against Pakistan following the April 22 Pahalgam attack. These meetings have already been lined up by Indian Embassies and Missions in the countries that the delegations are scheduled to visit.

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Teams to leave today

On Tuesday (May 20), foreign secretary Vikram Misri and other officials of the Ministry of External Affairs briefed three of the seven delegations that the Centre constituted last week for India’s overseas outreach in the aftermath of Operation Sindoor. The three delegations, led by JD (U) MP Sanjay Kumar Jha, DMK MP K Kanimozhi and the Shiv Sena’s Shrikant Eknath Shinde, are scheduled to leave for their destination countries on Wednesday (May 21).

The delegation led by Jha, which has Aparajita Sarangi, Brij Lal, Pradan Baruah, Hemang Joshi (of the BJP), CPM’s John Brittas, former External Affairs Minister and Congress veteran Salman Khurshid and Ambassador Mohan Kumar as its members, is bound for Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan, Singapore and the Republic of Korea.

The Kanimozhi-led delegation, which comprises BJP’s Brijesh Chowta, SP’s Rajeev Rai, National Conference MP Mian Altaf, Prem Chand Gupta of the RJD, the AAP’s Ashok Mittal and Ambassadors Manjeev Puri and Javed Ashraf, will visit Spain, Greece, Slovenia, Latvia and Russia.

The third delegation that will depart on Wednesday under the leadership of Shrikant Shinde includes BJP’s Bansuri Swaraj. Atul Garg, SS Ahluwalia and Manan Kumar Mishra along with IUML’s ET Mohammed Basheer, BJD’s Sasmit Patra and Ambassador Sujan Chinoy. This team will visit the UAE, Liberia, Congo and Sierra Leone.

The remaining four delegations, led by Congress’s Shashi Tharoor, NCP’s Supriya Sule, and the BJP’s Ravi Shankar Prasad and Baijayant Panda, are expected to be briefed by the MEA on Wednesday and will depart the following day for the cluster of nations assigned to them.

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Briefing today for four teams

The MEA has also explained to the delegates the rationale behind picking the countries that each of the delegations will be visiting. BJP’s Aparajita Sarangi, who is part of the delegation headed to Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan, Singapore and Korea, said the 33 countries that will be visited by the seven missions are either current members, both permanent and non-permanent, of the United Nations Security Council or were members in the recent past or are next in line to become members.

“This criteria for selecting the countries is very important because whenever the UNSC meets next, Pakistan, which is also due to become a non-permanent member in about 17 months, will present its position and make anti-India claims and so, in that light, it is an excellent strategy by our government to prepare beforehand for such an eventuality... when Pakistan makes its move, the UNSC will already know the truth because we are visiting these countries with dossiers that will make the factual position crystal clear,” Sarangi told The Federal.

At Tuesday’s briefing of the delegations, Misri, it is learnt, also rejected US President Donald Trump’s repeated assertion about mediating the ceasefire between India and Pakistan on May 10 by offering trade deals with his country.

Though sources said it is unlikely that the delegations will, in their interactions abroad, dwell on the role US claims to have played in brokering the cessation of hostilities between India and Pakistan, Misri’s clarification assumes significance as the Opposition has been demanding since May that the Centre come clean on the truth behind Trump’s claims.

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More embarrassment for Congress

Already unhappy with the Centre picking Shashi Tharoor as leader of a delegation without the Congress high command’s consent, the Congress leadership was embarrassed on Tuesday when Khurshid came out of the briefing stoutly rejecting the talk of mediation by the US.

“There was no interference by anyone; there was no mediation... whatever has happened, has happened only between the two nations. When the matter escalated, it was between our two nations. When it ended, it ended between the two nations. It was initiated by the Pakistan DGMO... We said that it should be done if they are ready,” Khurshid said, also brushing aside the Congress’s protestations about the government having accepted the ceasefire without any visible or tangible benefits being accrued to India.

“Politics within the country is our right, our duty; it is different. But outside the country, what we have to say, is different,” Khurshid said when journalists pointed out that his assertions stood in contrast to what his party had been saying publicly for days.

The Congress and other Opposition parties have been pressing the Modi government to reveal what assurances it received from Pakistan when India accepted the ceasefire despite being in an advantageous military position against the neighbour.

Rahul Gandhi, the Lok Sabha’s Leader of Opposition, has also been slamming External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar over the latter telling news agencies that “at the start of the operation we had sent a message to Pakistan saying we are striking at terrorist infrastructure, we are not striking at the military; so, the military has an option of standing out and not interfering... they chose not to take that good advice”.

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Normal military protocol

Though Jaishankar was essentially reiterating what Director General Military Operations Lt Col Rajiv Ghai had told reporters last week — that he had informed his Pakistani counterpart on May 7 that India had only struck terror camps in Pakistan and not any military installation — the Lok Sabha LoP has launched a scathing blitzkrieg asserting that what the External Affairs Minister had done was “wasn’t a lapse, it was a crime”.

Recounting the sequence of events that played out since the launch of Operation Sindoor past 1 am on May 7, Misri is learnt to have told the delegations that India’s DGMO had, as per normal military protocol, informed his Pakistani counterpart on the morning of May 7 about the strikes India launched at the nine terror hotspots.

The Foreign Secretary also told the delegates that there was “no question of any information about the operation being shared with Pakistan by anybody on the Indian side” before the nine terror camps were hit and that Jaishankar’s statement only alluded to the information shared between the DGMOs before Pakistan’s military escalated the hostilities.

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Misri’s clarification

Likewise, Misri is also learnt to have clarified that the decision for a “ceasefire understanding” was arrived at during talks between the DGMOs of Pakistan and India “without any negotiation by the US” and that an “unnecessary confusion” was created because of the way the US President made the announcement before either India or Pakistan could go public with it.

The Foreign Secretary is learnt to have informed the delegates that the appeal for a ceasefire had “come from the DGMO of Pakistan on the morning of May 10” and that India had accepted it “because our intent was never to escalate the situation the Pakistani military or strike Pakistani civilian areas but to dismantle terror infrastructure, which we had accomplished on May 7 itself”.

Sources privy to the briefing conducted by Misri said the delegations have also been told to convey to all countries they visit that India will not stand for any third-party mediation with Pakistan on the Kashmir issue.

“The discussions the delegations have with whoever they meet in the countries assigned to them will be only on the issue of terrorism — Pakistan’s role in harbouring and nurturing terrorists, India’s zero-tolerance response to terror and the need for a global consensus on how to combat terrorism and deal with countries that provide terror outfits safe harbour. No other issue will be on the table and any third-party interference on Kashmir will certainly not be entertained,” a member of one of the delegations present at the briefing told The Federal.

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Dossiers for every group

Shinde, who heads the delegations bound for the UAE and West African nations, told reporters, “The MEA did a country-wise briefing for all the groups and gave details of previous terrorist attacks on India. We will tell the countries we visit about what India has been facing because of Pakistan and the terror it has exported over the years. The MEA will provide dossiers to every group giving all these details.”

On India’s decision to keep the IWT in abeyance, sources said Misri informed the delegations that the decision shouldn’t be seen singularly as a response to the Pahalgam terror attack but an extension of India’s efforts of the last several years to re-negotiate the treaty with Pakistan.

“The IWT was a goodwill gesture towards Pakistan from our side but given Pakistan’s role in perpetrating terror strikes in India, that goodwill cannot be one-sided and a treaty we offered as a goodwill gesture cannot continue in the same form... That said, much has also changed since the treaty was first signed and so if Pakistan wants the treaty restored, it has to agree to new negotiations and the first condition has to be that Pakistan stops its terror universities,” a member of the delegation being led by Sanjay Jha told The Federal.