In Karan Thapar interview, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor strongly ‘defends’ BJP on Operation Sindoor. Here's what he said?

Congress Member of Parliament (MP) Shashi Tharoor is being labelled as ‘principal spokesman’ for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government with regard to his stand on ceasefire between India and Pakistan and the ‘mediation’ that the US President Donald Trump administration claims to have played. 

Last week, President Trump suggested that the US mediated between the two neigbouring countries during the cross-border conflict after India's Operation Sindoor hit nine terror bases in Pakistan in the aftermath of Pahalgam terror attack.

Tharoor, in an interview with Karan Thapar, can be heard objecting to Trump's mediation claims. Mediation, Tharoor said in the interview, would have been if S Jaishankar (EAM) called Americans and said listen: we want to get this done with. 

“Would you convey this to Pakistanis, please... A, B, C. That, I don't think India would have done. I would be astonished if India had done that,” Tharoor, the former Minister of State for External Affairs, says. 

At this point, Thapar asks Tharoor how, as a member of the opposition Congress, he would know what Jaishankar said or did? “Your own party leaders Malikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi are questioning US mediation claims. How can you be so certain there wasn't?”

“I am giving you my best-educated guess. That is from my long experience of how these things are conducted, if I know how Indian foreign policy conducts itself. Jaishankar, as you know, was a career diplomat before becoming a political foreign minister; this is the way he is trained to function. I am prepared to be proven wrong,” Tharoor, Congress MP from Thiruvananthapuram, responds to Thapar.

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Contradictory to what Trump said, Centre suggested that it were the Director Generals of Military Operations (DGMOs) of the two nations who decided to halt military action. In fact, India and Prime Minister Modi have asserted that it was Pakistan's DGMO who reached out to his Indian counterpart seeking a ceasefire.

Tharoor faced flak from some for his views defending the BJP government. 

“Watch Shashi Tharoor, grilled by Karan Thapar, emerge as the principal spokesman of, and the leading apologist for, the BJP government with respect to what might have led to the ceasefire between India and Pakistan and what the Trump administration’s role might have been in this regard,” senior journalist and Director, the Hindu Publishing Group, N Ram said sharing a link to Tharoor's interview with Karan Thapar.

During the interview, Tharoor goes on to say that Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government’s silence after Trump’s ‘mediation’ tweets might as well mean the government is conveying the objection privately to Donald Trump's administration.

“I have understood Indian foreign policy. Mine is what you call an informed and educated opinion. It is not on the basis of classified information and not based on briefings of the government,” said Tharoor, who is also chairman of Parliamentary Committee on External Affairs.

Tharoor goes on to say in ‘Operation Sindoor’, India conducted itself absolutely in a ‘calibrated’ and responsible manner. “It had said in the very beginning that it wasn't trying to see the attack on nine terror sites as an opening salvo of some sort of protracted war. It had said very clearly we are done and if Pakistan reacts, we are obliged to react back to them, if they don't react, we are not planning any action,” he said

Operation Sindoor Gains?

What we gained by Operation Sindoor is that we have sent a very clear signal on the May 7, Tharoor says. 

"Not the whole four days. The first day, our actions were calibrated, calculated and precise. We indicated, we would not tolerate Pakistan-backed terrorism on our soil. We have conveyed that nonetheless as a matured power, we would conduct our response so carefully that we were able to actually target very specific targets, including, I am told, a building in the LeT compound while minimising collateral damage,” he says.

Tharoor lists 2016 surgical strikes and 2019 Balakot strikes, and now Operation Sindoor after the Pahalgam attack, perhaps pointing towards the Modi government's Pakistan policy in about a decade.

“We hit the terrorist bases in the heartland of Punjab… we tell the guys the gloves are off. This is a powerful message and needed to be sent and was sent,” he said about Operation Sindoor.

In response, Thapar said it was a shame that the Indian government doesn’t have a spokesperson as eloquent and effective as Tharoor was. “They need someone to forcefully speak for them,”  Thapar says.

Ram said at a time when Congress leaders and elected representatives are asking questions and demanding answers from the Government, Tharoor’s smug assertions and “educated guesses” seem calculated to make his party squirm. "Are we missing something political here?” Ram asked.

In a post on X, Tharoor explained on Monday how President Trump’s post on India-Pakistan conflict was disappointing for India in many important ways" Tharoor said, among four ways, that Trump's posts ‘internationalised’ the Kashmir dispute and 're-hyphenates' India and Pakistan in the global imagination.

What did Donald Trump say?

President Trump's first post on India-Pakistan "ceasefire", which India called a"bilateral understanding", came on Saturday (May 10), minutes before an official announcement by India and Pakistan. His second post on May 11 again referred to the "ceasefire" and stated, “I am proud that the USA was able to help you arrive at this historic and heroic decision.”

Later, minutes before Prime Minister Narendra Modi's address to the nation on Operation Sindoor, the US President said trade was a big reason why India and Pakistan stopped fighting.

These comments by Trump prompted the Opposition Congress to question PM Modi.  

“We heard US President Donald Trump before PM Modi, and that has disturbed every single Indian...When Donald Trump says that it was because of the threat of withdrawal of trade that we stopped, that comes as a very, very shocking declaration or announcement from Donald Trump,” Congress leader Pawan Khera said.