Jaishankar’s rebuke: Necessary message
At the UN General Assembly, Jaishankar rejects Pakistan’s framing of terrorism and self-defence charges while Sharif revisits Kashmir, Indus waters and Trump’s role
At the 81st UN General Assembly, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar delivered India’s sharpest riposte yet to Pakistan, calling it a "serial practitioner of terrorism" without naming it directly. The target was unmistakable: a day earlier, PM Shehbaz Sharif had told the same assembly that Pakistan’s response to Operation Sindoor was an exercise of its "inherent right of self-defence," credited Donald Trump for a "timely intervention" in the 2025 conflict, and revived Kashmir and the Indus Waters Treaty. Jaishankar’s reply was blunt: arguments invoked to normalise terrorism and claim immunity from its consequences "will not stand." Friendship, he said, cannot coexist with terrorism.
On substance, Jaishankar’s case is strong. The Pahalgam attack of April 22, which killed 26 civilians, was condemned by the Security Council within days; the Resistance Front’s claim of responsibility was well documented, even as Pakistan lobbied to keep its name out of the Council’s statement. Operation Sindoor’s strikes on Jaish-e-Mohammed’s Bahawalpur stronghold and Lashkar-e-Taiba’s Muridke base followed the red line India has held since 2016: cross-border terror invites cross-border retaliation. Framing this as self-defence rests on firmer ground than Sharif’s attempt to cast Pakistan’s response as the defensive act.
Where the speech is weaker is in what it leaves unresolved. Refusing to name Pakistan gives the address deniability but also dilutes it. The speech also recycled language he used at three previous Assemblies — epicentre of global terrorism, consequences, mend its ways, which sounds cliche. And it also fell short of calling Trump bluff on being a peacemaker.
The danger Jaishankar named — arguments that normalise terrorism and grant its sponsors immunity — is real and growing. When a state’s leadership credits an army chief for actions triggered by a terror attack, and frames retaliation for that attack as the aggression needing justification, the line between perpetrator and victim starts to blur. Pakistan has used terrorism to inflict pain and cannot wash its hands by saying it has nothing to do with those non-state actors.
The speech worked: it dominated headlines, reasserted India’s post-Pahalgam doctrine — no talks under terror, blood and water cannot flow together — and signalled continuity to a domestic audience still processing last year’s conflict. But as diplomacy meant to move opinions, it did less.
The general debate is a stage for talking past adversaries, not persuading them, and nothing said on Saturday will alter Pakistan’s calculus or loosen Washington’s studied ambiguity between two nuclear-armed states it would rather not choose between. Effective messaging, then; not yet effective policy.
The real test was never the assembly hall — it is whether major capitals now treat normalising terrorism as disqualifying, or merely as rhetoric to nod along with before returning to business as usual with Islamabad.
