External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Tuesday urged the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) to remain committed to its founding goals of combating terrorism, separatism, and extremism, calling for an “uncompromising” stance on such threats. Speaking at the SCO foreign ministers’ meeting in Tianjin, with his Chinese and Pakistani counterparts present, Jaishankar strongly justified India’s response to the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack.
“The three evils that SCO was founded to combat were terrorism, separatism and extremism. Not surprisingly, they often occur together. Recently, we in India witnessed a graphic example in the terrorist attack in Pahalgam on April 22,” he said.
Jaishankar, who is making his first visit to China since the Galwan Valley clashes of June 2020, added, “The UN Security Council, of which some of us are currently members, issued a statement that condemned it in the strongest terms and ‘underlined the need to hold perpetrators, organisers, financiers and sponsors of this reprehensible act of terrorism accountable and bring them to justice’.”
“We have since done exactly that and will continue doing so,” he asserted.
The External Affairs Minister said the attack was “deliberately conducted to undermine” the tourism economy of Jammu and Kashmir and sow a religious divide.
Swipe at China’s BRI
Without naming China directly, Jaishankar also made a veiled reference to Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), stressing that cooperation must respect territorial integrity and sovereignty.
“It is essential that such cooperation is based on mutual respect, sovereign equality and in accordance with territorial integrity and sovereignty of member states,” he said.
Jaishankar noted that the world today was grappling with “more conflicts, competition and coercion,” and called for stabilising the global order. “The challenge before us is to stabilise the global order, de-risk various dimensions and through it all, address longstanding challenges that threaten our collective interests,” he said.