Pakistan likes to dangle nuclear bogey to get the world excited, Tharoor says in Washington

All-party delegation led by Congress MP Shashi Tharoor in a meeting with U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee for Operation Sindoor global outreach, in Washington, D.C. on June 4, 2025. | Photo Credit: ANI

There was no significant risk that the recent fighting between India and Pakistan, following the April 22 terrorist attack in Pahalgam, was approaching a nuclear threshold, according to Congress MP Shashi Tharoor.

“I think what happened was so far short of anything remotely approaching a nuclear threshold that the proposition, frankly, is laughable,” he said at a discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington DC on Thursday (June 5, 2025).

Mr Tharoor, who heads the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs, is leading a multi-party delegation of lawmakers and former Ambassadors on a diplomatic outreach tour of Guyana, Panama, Colombia, Brazil, and the U.S.

Seven such delegations have been dispatched around the world following the armed conflict between India and Pakistan in early May.

“Our Pakistani friends, I think, like to dangle this nuclear bogey to get all of you excited and anxious,” he said, when asked if the conflict came close to a nuclear war and if nuclear brinkmanship was to be expected in the future.

“We’ve got a nuclear power engaged in the war right now for two-and-a-half years in Europe, and no one has talked about nukes yet,” he said, asking why there was such a discussion just after a few days of fighting in India.

[Mr. Tharoor was presumably referring to the Russia-Ukraine war which began in February 2022. There have been repeated discussions about and reporting on the risk of Russia using nuclear weapons].

Mr. Tharoor urged people not to worry about India using nuclear weapons, as he emphasised India’s “no first use” policy and Pakistan’s lack of one.

India’s response via Operation Sindoor and the subsequent fighting with Pakistan was “calibrated retribution” (for the attack in Pahalgam) and did not pose an existential threat to Pakistan, he said.

‘Mediation not a term we will entertain’

In his time in Washington so far, Mr. Tharoor has repeatedly pushed back against the prospect of U.S. mediation, a subject that has come up given U.S. President Donald Trump’s claims that he brokered the May 10 ceasefire between the two countries and used trade with the U.S. as leverage to achieve it.

“I would never presume to tell the U.S. to stay the heck out of anything it wants to get involved in. But mediation is not a term that we are particularly willing to entertain,” he said, when asked if it was useful to have the U.S. as a mediator or broker or “transmitter of signals”.

“Mediation” implied an equivalence, Mr. Tharoor said, arguing that there was no equivalence between terrorists and their victims.

“There is no equivalence between a country that provides safe haven to terrorism and a country that’s a flourishing multi-party democracy that’s trying to get on with its business,” he added.

Acknowledging the calls between officials in the Trump administration and Modi government, while the conflict was under way, Mr. Tharoor said the Americans perhaps wanted to keep themselves informed. He guessed that perhaps U.S. officials persuaded the Pakistanis to stop fighting, as it was Islamabad that needed persuading to call off the confrontation.

Mr. Tharoor hit out at Pakistan’s Army chief, Asim Munir, for a speech he had made a few days before the April 22 attack, in which he had asserted that Hindus and Muslims are fundamentally different. Mr. Munir’s assertion was “astonishingly bigoted”, Mr. Tharoor said.

Mr. Tharoor was asked by his son, who is a journalist, if any of the delegation’s interlocutors had asked for evidence of who had carried out the April 22 attack.

“Very simply, no one had any doubt, and we were not asked for evidence, but media have asked,” the senior Tharoor said.

He listed Pakistan’s history of ties to terror attacks, the fact that former al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden was found in Pakistan before being killed by U.S. forces in 2011. He also said The Resistance Front had claimed responsibility for the Pahalgam attack initially and pointed to Pakistani military presence at the funerals of terrorists killed by India in counter-strikes.

“This showed all the hallmarks of a sophisticated, planned, deliberate operation,” Mr. Tharoor said.

Published - June 05, 2025 10:47 pm IST