India should celebrate Pakistan’s mediation that led to a US-Iran ceasefire because we want peace too, senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor told NDTV’s Vasudha Venugopal in an exclusive interview today. He also described India’s response as “mature” and “sensible”.
Asked if Islamabad’s role in mediating the truce should make New Delhi apprehensive, he replied, “I don’t see why, because honestly, not everything is zero-sum. If Pakistan were being applauded for sending terrorists to India, then it would be a zero-sum game. But when what the Pakistanis are doing is working for a peace that we also want, I think we should actually be celebrating.”
“In fact, the government of India’s statement welcomed the peace, and that’s something that I think is right and mature and sensible because we have to navigate these developments with a combination of strategic restraint, a sense of regional responsibility, and a renewed commitment, don’t forget our role as the voice of the global South,” Tharoor said.
#NDTVExclusive | ‘Should Be Celebrated’: Shashi Tharoor (@shashitharoor) To @vasudha156 On Pakistan’s Role In Ceasefire
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The Congress leader, a career diplomat, referred to Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s gaffe on X, which led to claims that his social media post was actually drafted in Washington DC. “… Maybe the US was merely using Pakistan to give the ceasefire a neutral third-party face, allowing both the US and Iran to de-escalate without appearing to back down directly to one another,” he said.
“In other words, Pakistan might be a diplomatic fig leaf for the Americans rather than the real initiator of the peace, so we don’t have to immediately sit back and think that Pakistan has pulled off some sort of master stroke. But still, the fact that Pakistan is there doing this in Islamabad has to be respected, and I think that we’ve all seen the special relationship between President Trump and his ‘favourite Field Marshal’ Asim Munir,” he said.
“There is also the fact that Pakistan is a neighbour of Iran. They have a 900-km shared border, which means that if there were regional wars, the spillover could have been to their country in terms of refugee surges… Pakistan has what you might call skin in the game. And therefore, I think it’s understandable that Pakistan has a particular interest in trying to bring this to a halt,” Tharoor said.
The Congress MP, who heads the parliamentary standing committee on external affairs, said many global tectonic plates are shifting. “I don’t think that we can lightly sit back and not pay attention, but that doesn’t mean we’d have to see this in zero-sum game terms. It is not in any case a defeat for us because they have some unique advantages that nobody else has. Let them work on that. But I think we should watch as an interested neighbour, not as a critic or as a resentful country, because we have no interest in rooting for the failure of a peace process like this. What we want is regional security, and if a de-escalation happens in the Iran war, that will mean a stabilised energy market and the protection of Indian interests. Why should we disparage it?” he said.
Tharoor said India cannot afford to remain passive indefinitely “when fires are burning in our neighbourhood”. “There is a kind of vacuum in the global order that the Americans used to uphold as the ‘liberal international rules-based order’. Now the only rule appears to be that there are no rules at all, and there’s nothing very much liberal about it and it doesn’t seem very international,” he said.
India, he said, needs to be a credible voice to help build the architecture of a new emerging order in the region and in the world. “It’s not just about survival, it’s about showing some diplomatic initiative for the sake of our own growth, for the stability of our own region, and maybe for the moral conscience of the world too. We can’t afford the world to crumble,” he said.
Tharoor said a “law of the jungle” is not in anyone’s interest. “…that would make us all victims or at the mercy of very powerful superpowers and no one wants to be in that position. I think that we will now have to really emerge after this process as a voice of the global South, standing up for a world order, maybe not the one that’s just collapsing, but something that will replace it in a way that protects all our interests,” Tharoor said.
A four-time MP from Thiruvanathapuram, Tharoor has been at the forefront of the Congress campaign for the Kerala Assembly polls. The southern state voted in a single phase today.
Asked if the Congress-led United Democratic Front would have performed better if it had a Chief Minister face, he replied, “But we could also have done better if we had more time. Frankly, the Election Commission wasn’t very generous in asking us to vote on the 9th of April when constitutionally, the new assembly only needs to sit on the 23rd of May. We could have easily been given a couple of weeks more or even three weeks more for a meaningful campaign. But be that as it may, I think we have tried to get our message across. The message is one of change, and the message quite simply is that the people of Kerala need to have a better, more responsive, more effective government, and we in the UDF hope to provide it,” he said.