New Delhi:for backing terror attacks against the country because Islamabad has failed to display any seriousness about tackling terrorism, Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, the leader of an all-party delegation visiting the US, said on Sunday.

Pakistan is a “revisionist power” that is willing to use terror to gain control of Indian territory and the Pahalgam attack of April 22 was aimed at undermining normalisation in Jammu and Kashmir and provoking a backlash in the rest of India since the terrorists targeted only Hindus, Tharoor said during an interaction with think tanks and the media at the Indian consulate in New York.

The delegation led by Tharoor is one of seven teams of parliamentarians, political leaders and former diplomats that the Indian government has sent to different parts of the world to inform key partners of New Delhi’s new approach to combating cross-border terrorism and to explain the rationale behind Opeartion Sindoor, launched on May 7 to target terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan.

“No one sitting in Pakistan is going to be allowed to believe that they can just walk across the border and kill our citizens with impunity. There will be a price to pay and that price has been going up systematically,” Tharoor said. He noted that India responded to the Uri attack of 2016 with surgical strikes across the Line of Control (LoC) and the Pulwama suicide bombing of 2019 with an air strike on a terrorist camp across the international border.

“Now, we have not just crossed the LoC, we have also crossed the international border. We have hit Pakistan in their heartland and we’ve done so only to send a message about terror. We remain absolutely clear that we are not interested in warfare with Pakistan,” he said.

“We have no desire to have anything that the Pakistanis have. Sadly, we may be a status quo power, they are not. They are a revisionist power, they covet territory that India controls and they want to have it at any price. And if they can’t get it through conventional means, they’re willing to get it through terrorism. That is not acceptable to us.”

The Pahalgam attack on April 22, which killed 26 people, was aimed at disrupting the process of normalisation in Jammu and Kashmir as more tourists were visiting the region and to provoke a backlash in the rest of India as the “victims were overwhelmingly Hindu” and were identified by the attackers on the basis of their religion, he said.