According to India’s Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, “Pakistan has also started understanding” India’s capabilities and that India has a policy of removing anti-New Delhi “terrorists” abroad.
In response to a shocking exposé published in the British daily The Guardian, Indian Defense Minister Rajnath Singh said that his country has a strategy of expelling people who are critical of New Delhi overseas and that “Pakistan has also started understanding this.”
“Any terrorist from a neighboring nation who attempts to cause trouble in India or engage in terrorist activity here would receive an appropriate response. In an interview with an Indian TV news program on Friday, Singh stated, “If he manages to get away and go to Pakistan, we will go there and kill him.”
He was responding to a Guardian piece that claimed up to 20 extrajudicial executions of people in Pakistan since 2020 had been carried out by operatives of New Delhi’s formidable Research and Analysis Wing, or RAW.
The report contained claims about how India started to plan assassinations overseas — from its sleeper cells in the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere — following a change in national security strategy after 2019. It also featured statements from intelligence officers from Pakistan and India and documents given by researchers from Pakistan.
“India constantly seeks to uphold positive ties with its surrounding nations… However, we won’t spare anyone who repeatedly gives India the evil eye, visits the country, and tries to encourage terrorism,” Singh declared.
Singh also referenced Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who leans right, as saying that this strategy is “right”.
“India is capable of doing that. Pakistan has also begun to realize this.”
According to the Pakistani Foreign Office, the network of extrajudicial executions in India has grown to become a “global phenomenon” on Friday. Citing assassination plans discovered in the US and Canada in the previous year, it said that the murders “needed a coordinated international response.”
Since a 2019 suicide bombing of an Indian military convoy in India-administered Kashmir, which claimed the lives of at least 44 Indian soldiers, was claimed by a militant group banned in Pakistan, relations between the two countries have deteriorated. This prompted New Delhi to launch an airstrike on what it claimed to be a militant base in Pakistan.
Pakistan, for its part, denied providing sanctuary to the jihadist organization and asserted that it had shot down two fighter jets of the Indian air force and carried out airstrikes against six sites in India-administered Kashmir.
A few days later, Islamabad sent the Indian pilot who had been arrested back to New Delhi in an effort to ease tensions in the area.
Plots to kill people in the US and Canada
Earlier this year, Pakistan claimed to have solid proof that two of its people had been killed on its territory by Indian spies.
The Guardian article was published months after the United States and Canada charged India with murdering or attempting to kill citizens of those nations.
In September, Canada declared that it was investigating “credible allegations” that connected India to the June shooting killing of a Sikh separatist leader.
Ottawa later withdrew 41 diplomats from India after New Delhi in September asked Ottawa to reduce its diplomatic presence following Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s allegations. A top Canadian official said in January that India was cooperating in the matter and bilateral ties were improving.
The US similarly said in November that it had thwarted an Indian plot to kill a Sikh separatist leader and announced charges against a person it said had worked with India to orchestrate the attempted murder.
According to Modi, India will look into any facts it learns about the situation.
At a campaign event on Thursday, Modi discussed the nation’s overseas actions, stating that “today’s India goes inside enemy territory to strike.”
“These cases exposed the increasing sophistication and brazenness of Indian-sponsored terrorist acts inside Pakistan, with striking similarities to the pattern observed in other countries, including Canada and the United States,” the Pakistani foreign ministry stated.
“It is imperative that those responsible for these extrajudicial and extraterritorial killings—perpetrators, enablers, financiers, and sponsors—be brought to account. India’s flagrant disregard for international law necessitates international accountability.”
SOURCE: TRTWORLD
