India offers battle-tested counter-terror expertise to ASEAN, says Rajnath Singh

NEW DELHI: India is ready to share counter-terrorism expertise with ASEAN member states and the bloc's dialogue partners, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh said on Thursday, offering know-how he described as proven in real operations rather than picked up in classrooms.

Addressing a conclave of ASEAN defence ministers and the grouping's dialogue partners at Cebu in the Philippines, he said the offer would be taken forward through joint exercises, capacity-building programmes and intelligence-sharing, and described India's record as "battle-tested".

Such cooperation, he said, would strengthen the collective capabilities of the ADMM-Plus grouping. India's experience, he added, had been built over decades of confronting cross-border security challenges, and each strategy it had devised had been proved in actual operations and shown to work rather than drawn from theory.

His call for joint action against terrorism drew particular attention at the meeting, where he also raised maritime security. Singh held up Operation Sindoor, launched last year, as the clearest example of India's approach, saying a large amount of terrorist infrastructure was destroyed and that the operation amounted to a declaration of the country's stance on terror sponsored by states.

Singh also referred to Pakistan's use of terrorism against India while describing what Indian agencies had learnt over the years, a point he placed at the heart of his pitch to the grouping.

On the wider region, Singh said India supports an Indo-Pacific that is secure and resilient, one where peace and stability are the product of collective effort and not "merely aspirations". He described maritime security as tied to peace, security and prosperity in the region, and said India judged the issue in those terms.

He flagged concern over disruption on some maritime trade routes and said trade lanes now faced new kinds of international threats, arguing that statements on maritime security were no longer enough on their own. India, he said, would keep acting as a "trusted net security provider" in the Indian Ocean region and the wider Indo-Pacific.

Singh said India's emphasis on the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and its advocacy of freedom of navigation and overflight, was not aimed at any country and was meant to protect the interests of all stakeholders in the region. The comments come as several ASEAN members and other democratic countries press persistently for adherence to the convention in the face of concerns over China's expanding military activity in the contested South China Sea.

(With inputs from media reports)