India on Friday used its Right of Reply at the UN General Assembly’s First Committee to hit out at Pakistan, saying nuclear weapons must not be treated as “routine instruments of statecraft” and asserting that New Delhi will “not bow” to nuclear blackmail. Responding after Pakistan raised Jammu and Kashmir during the plenary meeting on Disarmament and International Security, India said its capabilities are defensive and shaped by its security environment.
Delivering India’s response, Anmol Sher Singh Bedi, Senior Adviser (Disarmament) at the Permanent Mission of India to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, said Jammu and Kashmir is an integral and inalienable part of India. He also said India does not seek conflict, but warned that a lack of accountability for reckless actions keeps fuelling crises in the region.
“We call for India’s illegally occupied territories to be vacated and returned,” Bedi said. “India has always stood for peace and continues to seek peace with one and with all. However, if there is no accountability for reckless actions, then peace rarely becomes a pause between crises,” he said.
He said India’s capabilities are “defensive in nature” and are not directed against any state. “We heard concerns about escalation. These are legitimate concerns. However, these are best judged by conduct over time. Nuclear weapons must not be treated as routine instruments of statecraft,” he said. “A posture that relies on nuclear overhang to limit the consequences of subconventional activity raises the risk of escalation and not the prospect of restraint,” Bedi added.
Referring to Pakistan’s approach, Bedi said crises in the region have often followed a “recurring pattern: first, provocation; second, denial of responsibility; and third, appeals for restraint once a response has been made”. He added, “Where those in power are neither elected by people nor accountable to them, their decisions carry no risk and impose no cost for those who take them. That is how crisis becomes an instrument of power. That is how instability becomes useful, and that is how the cycle keeps on repeating.”
“The use of force by states under the garb of non-state actors does not erase the state’s responsibility. India’s right of self-defence remains intact,” he said. Bedi said India has drawn three clear lines: “First, any terrorist attack against India will receive a fitting response. Second, India will not bow to nuclear blackmail. Third, India will make no distinction between those who sponsor terrorism and those who mastermind it.”
He told the committee that India’s actions in May last year followed a “grave provocation” after the Pahalgam terror attack, in which 26 civilians were killed. “These actions were measured, targeted, and designed to be non-escalatory,” he said. In May last year, India launched Operation Sindoor targeting terror infrastructure in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir in retaliation for the April 22 attack in Pahalgam in Jammu and Kashmir, which was carried out by The Resistance Front, a proxy of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, and killed 26 civilians, most of them tourists.
