India steps up efforts to expose 'state- supported' Pakistan terrorism on global stage
At the heart of this threat is a 'military-intelligence establishment that has transformed soldiers into jihadist trainers, fueling decades of terror' across South Asia, sources said.
In the wake of the Pahalgam terrorist attack, the government has been briefing various governments at different levels in its bid to build a broader coalition to put pressure on Pakistan.
'Pakistan's track record in sponsoring, sheltering, and exporting terrorism is one of the most dangerous and destabilising forces in the world. For decades, its soil has been used as a launchpad for cross-border terrorism, insurgency, and extremist ideology,' sources pointed out.
The sources said that Pakistan's Defence Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif admitting that 'the country supported terrorist groups for more than three decades' is part of a pattern—similar to former President Pervez Musharraf conceding that 'his forces trained militant groups to fight' in Kashmir.
'He confessed that the government turned a blind eye because it wanted to force India to enter into negotiations, as well as raise the issue internationally.'
On the broader point, the sources said countries need to understand the global ramifications of Pakistan's actions. 'A pattern of Pakistan-sponsored terror has emerged across the globe,' they said, citing attacks linked to its networks—including the bombings of Indian and U.S. embassies in Kabul (2008, 2011), the 2005 London attacks, and the 2024 concert hall massacre in Moscow. 'In each of these cases, investigations have uncovered evidence of logistical or ideological support originating from Pakistani networks,' sources said, adding that it is time countries take urgent note and immediate action against these patterns.
'Pakistan hosts a network of terror training camps across provinces like Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly NWFP), Waziristan, and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK).
These camps, operated by groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), Hizbul Mujahideen (HM), and transnational outfits like ISIS-Khorasan, serve as hubs for radicalisation, weapons training, and suicide mission preparation,' the sources said. 'Former Pakistani Army personnel often assist in training, lending military expertise to enhance operational lethality.'
'What India has been saying has also been corroborated by other agencies and governments, including U.S. State Department reports and intelligence assessments,' the sources said. 'The need to combat terrorism in all its forms and manifestations is what we have been consistently telling all our interlocutors.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Hindu
2 minutes ago
- The Hindu
India's presence amid a broken template of geopolitics
It is time for India to punch its weight and enhance its global presence at a time when global geopolitics is being reset. But, as of now, it is not moving India's way. Operation Sindoor was a reality check when many of India's strategic partners were not willing to call out Pakistan for harbouring United Nations-sanctioned terrorist groups and terrorists. It is now known that three of the perpetrators of the Pahalgam attack (April 22, 2025), who were eliminated recently, were Pakistanis belonging to the Lashkar-e-Taiba. While India's retaliation against terror camps in Pakistan was decisive, it struggled to get this narrative out in the face of United States President Donald Trump repeatedly claiming that it was he who had brought about a ceasefire using trade as a weapon — a claim contradicted by the Government in the recent parliamentary debate. In an unkind twist, Pakistan's Field Marshal Asim Munir was invited to lunch with Mr. Trump after Operation Sindoor. However, the U.S. designated The Resistance Front (TRF), which claimed responsibility for the Pahalgam attack, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) and Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT). And in a welcome recognition, the report by the UN Security Council's Monitoring Team also named the TRF for the Pahalgam attack. A path with Trump-created hurdles But all is not well. On a historic day when the NISAR satellite (India-U.S. collaboration) was launched, Mr. Trump hit India with a 25% tariff. However, he made a purely trade issue, which could have been resolved in negotiations, into a geopolitical issue, threatening India by 'substantially' raising tariffs for its importing Russian oil when Ukrainians are being killed by the 'Russian War Machine.' India was being trumped especially when Mr. Trump himself is a strong votary of U.S.-Russian rapprochement. While one can dismiss this as typical Trump-style last minute pressure, he has already called on U.S. companies not to invest in India but only in the U.S., and hire only Americans. This comes on the heels of the U.S.'s lopsided security and trade deals with its Indo-Pacific allies and the European Union (EU). American tech giant Nvidia has been permitted by the U.S. to resume sales of its H20 AI chips to China, stopped earlier due to national security concerns. More time has been given to China to get the deal done. After getting bogged down in Ukraine and West Asia, the U.S. has less focus on East Asia. Consequently, if a broader geopolitical understanding between the U.S. and China on East Asia was to come about, it would constrict the space for India. East Asian countries are already hedging their bets. The U.S.'s posturing on South Asia has not helped either. Growing U.S.-Pakistan relations have again become an irritant. Even if this is a reset in bilateral relations, the U.S. has displayed astonishing insensitivity to India's security concerns by praising Pakistan for counter-terrorism efforts, and regional stability. In Bangladesh, the U.S. had gone against Indian interests in supporting the ouster of Sheikh Hasina. In Myanmar, U.S. and European support for forces opposing the military government is destabilising India's north-east. After Galwan and Pahalgam, India's hope for better understanding and coordination with the U.S. on regional security interests has been belied. Mutual trust is being rapidly eroded. Acting in concert with the U.S., the EU is targeting India's import-led energy security at a time when India is negotiating an India-EU Broad-based Trade and Investment Agreement. The EU has sanctioned India's Vadinar Refinery, where Russian Rosneft has a large stake, knowing full well that stopping Russian oil into India will lead to huge pressure on oil prices. On the other hand, Hungary, Slovakia, Belgium, Spain and others are importing Russian oil, through pipelines and as LNG, by securing exemptions or under existing contracts. Europe receives 51% of Russian LNG exports. The EU's carbon border tax and digital and other trade barriers on India remain. India hopes that the recently concluded India-U.K. Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) will force the EU to climb down from its asks in its trade negotiations. China's moves All this has given China an opportunity to, once again, become active in India's neighbourhood. China has proposed new groupings and new deals to keep India out. For example, China's meeting with Pakistan and Bangladesh in Kunming on June 19, 2025 proposed formalising a trilateral initiative, but Bangladesh has not agreed. China is also helping Bangladesh revive a Second World War airbase at Lalmonirhat which is close to the Siliguri Corridor. China's support to Pakistan during Operation Sindoor was extensive. China has also standardised Mandarin names for locations within Arunachal Pradesh. And it wants to seize the future of the institution of the Dalai Lama from India. Riding on a huge trade surplus with India, China is squeezing India's crucial supply chains such as rare earths, fertilizers, Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients, tunnel boring machines and technical personnel. More worrying is the planned construction of China's largest dam in Tibet on the Yarlung Zangbo (Tibetan name for the Brahmaputra), which is near the Indian border. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's recent visit to the Maldives has been timely given China's influence. To counterbalance an unpredictable, and even unreliable, U.S., an unresponsive EU and an aggressive China, India is carrying out a tightrope act. It has prioritised accelerating the current thaw in relations with China to reset equations after the Galwan conflict — despite there being no move towards de-escalation on the border after the initial disengagement in October 2024. Further, India should seriously rethink its stand to remain on the margins of global conflicts. India has been largely silent, if not openly pro-Israel, on the ongoing Israel-Gaza war — an unfolding multidimensional human tragedy. India was also largely silent on the recent Israel-Iran conflict and American bombings, despite important relations with both warring parties and huge stakes in the Gulf. Though it rightly abstained on the UN votes on the Ukraine conflict, its overall approach of not taking a proactive stand on world conflicts may hurt its larger interests and diminish its geopolitical clout as long as it remains on the sidelines. Operation Sindoor has shown India that if it seeks a greater engagement of its partners with its conflicts and issues, India needs to engage more with their conflicts and issues. Some argue that India should keep its head down and focus on becoming the third largest economy and that a larger geopolitical role may hurt its economic growth. The contrary is true. In a fragmenting world order, geopolitics, coercion and threats and protectionism are determining economic and technological outcomes — not most favoured nation or free trade or multilateral World Trade Organization-led trade norms. Therefore, to get its economic and technological trajectory right, India needs to get its geopolitics right. The road ahead Realising that the geopolitical space is shrinking, India is finally breaking free and has objected to the 'targeting'. It has called out the double-speak of the U.S. and the EU under the guise of safeguarding their economic interests — the EU for larger trade in goods and services with Russia than India in 2024, and the U.S. for importing Russian uranium, palladium, fertilizers and chemicals. India's call for a ceasefire in Gaza (it abstained on a similar UN General Assembly resolution two months ago), is a realisation that it needs to be assertive in global conflicts to preserve its strategic autonomy. Facing an erosion of trust with the U.S. and a U.S.-China deal, India needs to clinch an India-U.S. trade deal soon to prevent a further deterioration of relations and to persuade Mr. Trump to travel to India for the Quad summit (India-U.S.-Japan-Australia). After Mr. Trump's outburst, it is a moot point whether India will revive the RIC (Russia-India-China). However, greater engagement with BRICS (2026 summit in India), the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and with East Asia (having missed the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership bus), will only reinforce India's policy of multi-alignment and push back those who constrain it. No more can India just put our head down, mind its own economic business and expect to grow. That template is now broken. T.S. Tirumurti is former Ambassador/Permanent Representative of India to the United Nations, New York and former Secretary, Ministry of External Affairs, New Delhi
The Hindu
2 minutes ago
- The Hindu
Bullying tactics: on India pushing back against the U.S., the EU
After months of considerable forbearance, the statement by the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), on Monday, pushing back against the U.S. and the European Union (EU) for 'targeting' India is significant. The statement came two hours after Mr. Trump had announced penalty tariffs against India, 'substantially' above the current 25% rate set to go into place this week, for importing, processing and selling Russian oil. A day earlier, a senior Trump aide had accused India of 'financing' Russia's war in Ukraine. And on July 18, the EU had announced sanctions on India's Vadinar refinery (partially Russian owned), and secondary sanctions that will affect Indian refiners. The MEA spokesperson said that the measures were 'unjustified and unreasonable' as the U.S. and the EU continue to trade with Russia for goods including LNG, critical minerals and nuclear fuel requirements. The statement also said that it was the U.S. that had encouraged India to keep buying Russian oil to stabilise global markets, something the Biden administration had confirmed. The government said that in comparison to the western countries, India's Russian oil purchases are a 'vital national compulsion' as a result of the conflict in Ukraine, adding that India would '... safeguard its national interests and economic security'. The MEA's statement is the first such clear response on the issue since the Ukraine conflict. Taken with Union Minister Piyush Goyal's statement last week on the U.S. announcement of 25% reciprocal tariffs on India from August 7, Monday's statement indicates New Delhi's growing frustration with the U.S.'s increasingly offensive positions against India, including on immigration, trade negotiations, Operation Sindoor and Pakistan, and India's BRICS membership. It is unclear how and to what extent the government is prepared to stand up to the bullying tactics of Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump said on Tuesday that India has not been a 'good trading partner' — a possible reference to trade talks and the failure of a mini-deal, ostensibly over India's resistance on agricultural market access, dairy products and GM foods. While it is hoped that New Delhi will continue to engage Washington and Brussels to conclude their respective trade talks, the MEA statement is meant to make a larger point. Neither the U.S. nor the EU can decide which country India will partner or trade with. That message is being underlined in visits by Security Adviser Ajit Doval and External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar to Moscow, to prepare for the Russian President's visit to India later this year. India's sovereignty is non-negotiable and its foreign policy choices cannot be manipulated by other countries, no matter how significant their own ties with India are.
The Hindu
2 minutes ago
- The Hindu
The technocratic calculus of India's welfare state
With a billion Aadhaar enrollments, 1,206 schemes integrated into the Direct Benefit Transfer system, and 36 grievance portals across States/Union Territories, India's welfare orientation is transitioning into a technocratic calculus. The promise to deliver social welfare at scale, bypassing leaky pipelines and eliminating ghost beneficiaries, might have led to a 're-casting' that delivers 'efficiency' and 'coverage' at the cost of 'democratic norms' and 'political accountability'. An offloading Are we witnessing the emergence of a post-rights based welfare regime? Is the Indian digital welfare state headed towards a systemic impasse? What is the technocratic calculus behind all this? Recent game-theoretic work shows that technocratic rule thrives where parties are polarised. Evidently, our questions have changed. We have shifted from 'who deserves support and why?' to 'how do we minimise leakage and maximise coverage?' Our politicians across party lines have rationally offloaded hard-choices onto data-driven algorithms without questioning the complexities of constitutional values. Contextualising Habermas's 'technocratic consciousness' and Foucault's 'governmentality', India's welfare architecture is increasingly shaped by measurable, auditable, and depoliticised rationality. Schemes such as E-SHRAM and PM KISAN embody a uni-directional, innovation-led logic that is streamlined, measurable, and intolerant of ambiguity or error. Conversely, we have deliberative calls for participatory planning and local feedback embodying the long forgotten core of democratic thinking resonating Giorgio Agamben's notion of homo sacer — a life stripped of political agency. Seemingly, welfare, in the contemporary context, has ceased to exist as a site of democratic deliberations. On a microscopic level, a rights-bearing citizen has been replaced by the auditable beneficiary. Thus, it calls for an urgent need for the state to revisit (in a Rancierean sense) whether it is curating who is visible, who can complain, and whose suffering is computable. Despite claims of a 'socialistic state', we observe a decade-low decline in India's social sector spending that has dwindled to 17% in 2024-25 from the 2014-24 average of 21%. Further, there are some interesting observations beyond plain statistics. Key social sector schemes have borne the brunt of such decline where minorities, labour, employment, nutrition and social security welfare saw a significant decline from 11% (in the pre-COVID-19 phase) to 3% (in post-COVID-19 phase). Parallely, social commentators often comment the Right to Information (RTI) regime to be in 'existential crisis' and further uncovering the cloak on RTI exposes a critical issue within the institution of dysfunctional information commissions. As of June 30, 2024, the number of pending cases crossed the four lakh tally across 29 Information Commission's (ICs), and eight CIC posts were vacant (annual report of CIC, 2023-24). The Indian welfare regime must recover its capacity for reflexivity and situated knowledge, elements that are very peculiar to gram sabhas and frontline bureaucratic discretions. To draw Rancière's critique on democracy, we highlight one major impending concern, that 'democracy depends on whose suffering is rendered visible and contestable, not merely computable'. This concern is further highlighted in Justice D.Y Chandrachud's Aadhaar dissent (2018), that warned precisely against such decontextualisation of identity which served as a caution against reducing citizens to disembedded, machinic data who are devoid of care, context, or even constitutional assurance in some cases. Another instance of algorithmic insulation Another worrisome trend is the Centralised Public Grievance Redress and Monitoring System's flattening of the federal hierarchies into ticket-tracking systems. Although it is a novel initiative resolving tickets and routing complaints across state agencies, empirical data show that lakhs of grievances were disposed of between 2022-24. But on a closer examination it might just be centralising the visibility but not the responsibility — a form of algorithmic insulation that renders political accountability increasingly elusive. These observations are not to dismiss the value of such initiatives. Rather, they invite a deeper conversation on how welfare governance can evolve for a more resilient and responsive state. The government should now think along the lines of 'democratic antifragility' so that our systems built on perfect data and flawless infrastructure do not fail catastrophically under stress (consider Taleb's 'hyper-integrated systems'). We need to empower States to design context-sensitive regimes where federalism and welfare push for pluralism as a feature. Institutionalising community-driven impact audits (as reiterated by the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty), by looping in the Rashtriya Gram Swaraj Abhiyan and Gram Panchayat Development Plans should be the core target. All States must be made capable to build platform cooperatives where self-help groups act as intermediaries; functionally, lessons can be learnt from Kerala's Kudumbashree. Civil society must be incentivised to invest in grass-roots political education and legal aid clinics in order to strengthen the community accountability mechanisms. Lastly, it is time we strengthen and codify our offline fall-back mechanisms, human feedback safeguards, and statutory bias audits by embedding the 'right to explanation and appeal' — as proposed by the UN Human Rights for digital governance systems. Focus on the citizen We, as citizens of India, must realise that a welfare state stripped of democratic deliberations is a machine that works efficiently for everyone except those it is meant to help. For a Viksit Bharat we will have to reorient digitisation with democratic and anti-fragile principles so that citizens become partners in governance, and not mere entries in a ledger. Anmol Rattan Singh is the Co-founder of the PANJ Foundation, a Punjab-based policy research think tank. Agastya Shukla is a Programme Associate at the PANJ Foundation, a Punjab-based policy research think tank
