- Thursday, April 24, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
Indian external affairs minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar on Friday (5) called his Pakistani counterpart Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari the “promoter, justifier and spokesperson of a terrorism industry”.
He said after a meeting of the foreign ministers of the member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in the western Indian coastal state of Goa that “victims of terrorism do not sit together with its perpetrators to discuss terrorism”.
The Indian diplomat said Bhutto-Zardari came as the foreign minister of a member state of the SCO and it was part of multilateral diplomacy.
“We don’t see anything more than that,” he added.
Jaishankar, who invited Bhutto-Zardari to the event and welcomed him at the venue of the meeting, did not hold a bilateral talk with the latter.
“On terrorism, Pakistan’s credibility is depleting even faster than its forex reserves,” Jaishankar said, taking a dig at Pakistan’s current financial crisis that has forced Islamabad to seek external aid.
Jaishankar’s remarks also come on a day when five Indian Army soldiers were martyred in action while many were injured during an operation to find terrorists hiding in a forest near Poonch in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir.
The terrorists, suspected to be Pakistanis, had ambushed an army truck last week, killing five other soldiers.
