India defends Operation Sindoor at UN, slams Pakistan's ‘Theatre of deception' over Pahalgam terror attack

NEW DELHI: India on Wednesday forcefully defended its military action under Operation Sindoor, launched in response to the April 22
Pahalgam terror attack
that killed 26 Indian tourists, accusing Pakistan of harboring terrorists and attempting to distort the narrative at the United Nations.
Speaking at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Kshitij Tyagi, Counsellor at India's Permanent Mission, said, 'When a state harbours terrorists who massacre innocents, defensive action is not just a right, it is a solemn duty.'
Tyagi condemned Pakistan's attempt to 'mischaracterise' the retaliatory strikes, saying the world is not fooled by its "theatre of deception."
He pointedly referred to the barbaric execution of 26 Indian tourists in
Jammu and Kashmir
's Pahalgam, allegedly by Pakistani terrorists, which triggered India's cross-border military response on May 7.
'The UN Security Council rightly condemned this act of
terrorism
and called for all perpetrators, organisers, financiers and sponsors to be held accountable. And we all know that those sponsors operate from Pakistani soil,' Tyagi said.
India's four-day military campaign under Operation Sindoor targeted terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan-controlled territories, ending on May 10 after an understanding was reached to halt military actions.
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Tyagi also took aim at Pakistan's history of glorifying terrorists, saying: 'From hosting Osama bin Laden in its military cantonment to conducting state funerals for globally sanctioned terrorists, Pakistan never fails to disappoint. It claims victimhood while remaining the acknowledged epicenter of Jihadist terror.'
He dismissed Pakistan's statements at the UNHRC as an attempt to invert the roles of victim and perpetrator:
'Pakistan chose to spend almost its entire speaking time not addressing the global human rights review, but obsessively targeting India with a tired, fabricated narrative.'
Tyagi further justified India's decision to put the Indus Water Treaty into abeyance, calling it a response not only to terrorism but also to evolving climate, energy, and strategic imperatives.
'When a nation violates the foundation of a Treaty, it forfeits the right to invoke its protections. A nation cannot serve terror and expect to reap sympathy.'
He concluded by reaffirming India's resolve: 'India will continue to act with responsibility and resolve to protect its citizens, its sovereignty, and its values, as any nation must.'

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Time of India

29 minutes ago

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‘Diplomatic intervention': Pakistan nominates Donald Trump for 2026 Nobel Peace Prize; cites role in India-Pakistan crisis

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Hindustan Times

30 minutes ago

• Hindustan Times

Sam Dalrymple: 'The Northeast was probably the most affected by Partition'

This book is about the five partitions of the Indian Empire, which stretched from Aden in the west to Burma in the east to now 12 nations in three geographic regions. At the time, you write, even Britain downplayed its size. Nepal and Oman were never officially recognized. Arab states bordering the Ottoman Empire and Himalayan states near Tibet were left off the maps. But these were all run by the Indian political service, defended by the Indian army, their currency was the Indian rupee. So how did the British manage to hide them? And what did the Indian Empire actually look like? Sam Dalrymple, author, Shattered Lands (Courtesy HarperCollins) So, for example, a 1909 map [Political Divisions of the Indian Empire by The Indian Gazetteer] shows Burma as British India, and Nepal and Bhutan as princely states — they're in yellow exactly like Jaipur and Hyderabad are — but hides Arabia. A 1909 map of Aden by The Indian Gazetteer recognizes much of southern Yemen as dominated by princely states. A rare Indian Empire map from 1930 includes Aden but not the Gulf states. The British were always quite reticent to talk about what they were doing in the Arabian states, partially because very few people actually lived there. These were the poorest states in the Raj. Oil hadn't been discovered yet, and so, largely, it was small settlements on the coast. The Brits were only involving themselves in the cities and making sure that the sheikhs were abiding by them. The person who integrated the sheikhs of the Gulf into the Indian empire was Lord Curzon. Lord Curzon went on a Durbar trip to Sharjah [in 1903] and invited the sheikhs and gave them all gun salutes, and created a Persian Gulf residency, on the model of the Hyderabad residency or the Jaipur residency. So, subsequently you had the list of princely states beginning alphabetically with Abu Dhabi. There's a map of the Arabian peninsula in the Gazetteer issued to Indian civil servants, and if you placed it beside the India maps, it gave you a full picture of the size of the Indian Empire from Aden to Rangoon. The public never got to see its full scale though. The Ottoman Empire officially claimed the Arabian peninsula and the British wanted to avoid aggravating Constantinople, so they always kept the Arabian Raj off official maps of India. Likewise, Britain's presence in Nepal and Bhutan — they didn't want to scare China or Tibet. But officially under the Interpretation Act of 1889, these were India. And everyone was eligible for an Indian passport... At the Round Table Conference on Burma in 1931, Burmese leaders were against separation from India. In Aden at the same time, some saw 'the connection with India as organic.' The city's many Gujarati and Parsi residents thought Aden 'was an integral part of the Indian nation'. In the 1940s, the Nawab of Bhopal wanted the princely states to, instead of acceding to India or Pakistan, be unified as a third dominion called 'Rajastan'. The Nagas wanted a separate Christian state under the Commonwealth nation. Kalat [in present-day Balochistan], then the third largest princely state in the Raj, wanted to be independent. What were, at the time, considered the most plausible partitions? I think what's remarkable is how late the idea of independence comes up. It took them until 1929 to ask for it. What they'd all been asking for until then is for the interconnectivity of the empire to remain but for equal opportunity within the empire. The model was the Roman Empire, which, around 200 AD, became completely racially equal — so Philip the Arab could become the Roman emperor and then you've got people from Tunisia or Egypt or Syria or France suddenly ruling the Roman Empire. So, for early nationalists, it would have included everything from Aden to Burma as one giant country probably governed along a system like the United States of America, which was another country that had gained independence from Britain in the past. Once it became clear that independence was happening, you had hundreds of different ideas of what different states could look like and virtually no one could have imagined what we actually got. Gandhi wanted independence for basically Bharatvarsha. He wanted to carve out a nation state that resembled Bharat of Mahabharata fame. We're so used to this idea of undivided India that we forget until as late as the 1920s, it had never been attempted before to have all of it ruled on one country. Even Ashoka and the Mughals had never ruled over the whole of the subcontinent. There had always been a bit of Tamil Nadu or a bit of Kerala that had been independent. Or it had included Afghanistan as well or something. There were various other ideas of kind of uniting all the Muslim areas. There were ideas of Burmese nationalists. There was a very early idea of a Dravidian state that has Hindustan and India as two separate bits. The idea that we grow up with in Delhi schools is the idea that Gandhi had of this eternal Bharat. The fact that there were hundreds of other visions or just near misses is forgotten. 536pp, ₹799; HarperCollins Did Gandhi set the tone for what India now looks like? It wasn't him specifically. The idea that set it up was in the wake of the 1905 Partition of Bengal. You suddenly had nationalists producing images of Bharat Mata, and the Congress latched on to it. But the depiction of independent India as Bharat Mata alienated the Burmese and the Arabs. These partitions occurred within the last hundred years and still exist in living memory. The 'Long March' of about 600,000 Indian refugees from Burma, 80,000 of whom die... How well are these stories documented — and were they hard to access? The origin story of this book was from a conversation with someone in Tripura who I was asking about Partition for our Project Dastaan [an initiative co-founded by Dalrymple in 2018 to reconnect people displaced by Partition]. And they said 'Which partition? ... Because there was the 1937 one from Burma, 1947 from India. And then Pakistan became Bangladesh in 1971 and we got another influx for refugees.' And I, having studied Partition for three years, had never considered that. Each of these 12 countries has brushed over its past. Unlike Partition where lots of people are still alive, the 'Long March' was six years earlier so we've lost six more years and it's very late to get these stories out. I've only got a couple of people who I was able to interview in person. A Sikh family from north London — of the character Uttam Singh from the book, his grandkids — had reached out to me on Instagram and said they had a Partition story. I told them about what I was doing with the book and they said 'Oh, we were in Punjab for Partition, but actually before 1941 we were all in Burma.' And then they opened this trunk and they had an untranslated diary, photographs, and everything. I think that the key one though is Yemen — it lost most of its papers in the communist takeover of South Yemen. Many of the archives there were burnt. And all of these Arab states have been very harsh with their citizenship laws — about who gets to be Kuwaiti or from Dubai... and they don't particularly want to run over this history, especially in the present day. But the big story there got discovered by professor James Onley, who was the director of research at the Qatar National Library. He was commissioned by the sheikh of Qatar, who wanted to create a Qatari digital library, to find documents relating to Qatari history. And there was nothing in Qatar on what its life was before the 1950s and '60s. He eventually stumbled upon the fact that everything is sitting in the Bombay archives. It's not in London, it's not in Qatar, it's all in Bombay. He wrote a big book that's a classic called The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj (2007). You've used a lot of personal correspondences and diaries for your research — starting from letters written by John Simon [of the Simon Commission] to his mother describing his travels, or the ones between Sarojini Naidu and her daughter Padmaja, Asha Sahay who was a foot soldier of the INA, Uttam Singh... Tell me more about finding private papers and working with such personal research material. There were some particularly interesting ones. Two of the wildest interviews and private papers I had was Ghalib Al-Qu'aiti, the Yemeni Sultan, who's descended from the Nizam of Hyderabad. I ended up meeting him and he's living stateless in Jeddah; he's not allowed to leave the country and the Brits are refusing to give him a passport. He'd attempted to write his own autobiography but never got it published... he had all these letters and private papers that no one's really ever used before. The other one was Feroz Khan Noon, the seventh prime minister of Pakistan, who was removed when martial law was first imposed in 1957. His family live in Lahore and the family archives just haven't been utilized. And then the other one was actually my godmother Brigid Keenan who, as a young girl saw the last Brits disappearing through the Gateway of India and whose father was in the PBF, the Punjab Boundary Force. He was an Irishman who is one of the few people who volunteers to try and keep the peace... and I found his letters, which were just sitting in a house in Somerset. What was your most surprising discovery? That the Persian Gulf remained a part of the Indian Empire till 1947. That one muddled me. And it was weirdly difficult to find any papers on — so much of it is online, but it's difficult to find anyone talking about it. The thing that we've got to remember is that the Gulf was the lowest ranking princely states in the Indian empire. Not even worthy of one gun salute, you write. They weren't invited! The Sultan of Oman is the exception, and Qu'aiti State, the guys in Eastern Yemen. Oman had 21 [gun salutes] Qu'aiti State had 10, and Dubai and Abu Dhabi had zero. They all were invited to go to Mayo College, etcetera as princes. I think that's going be the big surprise for Indian readers – the fact that there was a world where the united oil wealth of the entire Gulf could have gone to either India, or let's not forget, Pakistan. These were Muslim-majority states, they could have joined Pakistan instead and probably would have. Many cities, thriving centres of culture and trade, suffered tragic declines in this time. What were some of the biggest casualties? I don't think we should be nostalgic about the 1930s. Each of these countries has gained things and lost things. This was a time of high imperialism and very racially segmented societies that worked on the basis of exclusion. One of the places that's changed the most and suffered the most in this time would probably be Hyderabad, which was this centre of courtly wonder and baroque palaces. So much has been lost, so many great libraries, collections of art — Hyderabad should be the number one tourist destination in the country and would have been in the 1930s. Jaipur and Jodhpur and Udaipur and all the places we visit today were nothing compared to Hyderabad. Half of it was bulldozed, destroyed and ghettoized in the wake of the events of the 1940s. But I feel like it's a complicated legacy. This was also a place of great brutality, probably the most socially hierarchical place in the entire subcontinent with bonded labour ruining the lives of most the population. Today, through the lens of modern politics, we often look at it as a Hindu-Muslim thing with the Nizam as a Muslim, but I think if we look at it through the lens of class, we see that this was the site of, in the 1950s, South Asia's biggest communist movement and communist revolution. The Indian Army was still fighting communists in the Telangana countryside three years after it went into the place. Burma lost something immense. It was the most multicultural region in Asia, and today it's driven by ethnic factionalism, mass murder and civil war. But at the same time, Rangoon in the 1930s was also not necessarily a completely open place. It was driven heavily by class and race. Aden was a very diverse cosmopolitan place filled with traders from across the Indian ocean. It was one-third Indian, one-third Somali, one-third Arab, about ten percent Jews. Like Rangoon, it is the one that's fallen the most from one of the great ports of the world to a southern Yemeni city that's now riven by ethnic and religious civil war. The culture of Lahore is mourned immensely. But there were quite justifiable reasons many Muslims felt like they needed separation. Urvashi Butalia and Aanchal Malhotra have both talked a lot about this. People in Lahore who lived through Partition, who miss their friends, but also will tell you about how Hindus were never able to eat in the same room as their Muslim best friends. You write about the alliance between India and Pakistan after Partition. How did it come about and what went wrong? Of the two books that really discovered this, one is Pallavi Raghavan's Animosity at Bay (2019), which is an alternative history of the relationship of India and Pakistan. After the ceasefire in 1949 over Kashmir, both countries were quite happy to leave it to the UN and move on creating a new future, particularly in the wake of the Liaquat–Nehru Pact. And so Jinnah's tomb was built by an Indian Muslim. His daughter lived in Bombay her whole life without much issue. There were whole communities with half a family living on one side and the other half on the other side of the border. The other book is Avinash Paliwal's who was the first to used declassified intelligence files from the Northeast, and he's completely rewritten everything that we thought — because until that point, we'd been relying on memoirs and oral histories and news reports, often which got things wrong. Bizarrely, the thing that breaks apart the India-Pakistan relationship is India sending the army into Goa [in 1961] to annex it from the Portuguese. And that whilst everyone in India and half the world saw this as a final moment of decolonization, the Pakistani leadership, which had a year earlier put a military pact with India on the table, saw it as India suddenly muscling up its army, taking on European powers militarily, and essentially as a new Indian expansionism — that India would have this irredentist thing of trying to claim back lost territory. So the Pakistani leadership was terrified and started funding Naga separatists the same year. Within a year, India started funding the Pashtuns and Bengali separatists. And it became a tit for tat. But from 1949 to 1960, the whole of the 1950s, there was another way, many what-ifs that could have happened. And I think that more research really needs to be done to figure out the details of what went wrong. The 1965 war is actually the one that broke down the complete relationship: enemy property acts come in, all transport across the borders stopped, the beginning of a border wall is built up. How was the Northeast affected by Partition? The Northeast was probably the most affected by Partition. It's the reason that the Northeast is now a strange appendage on the right of India. Tripura was 20 kms from Chittagong, South Asia's largest port, and suddenly became landlocked by 2,000 kms in an area with no roads. The economy completely crumbled, and the indigenous population was overwhelmed by Bengalis flooding into the country. Half of the conflict, with the exception of Arunachal Pradesh, all of the others — the AFSPA agitation, the insurgencies in Tripura, Mizoram and Nagaland — have roots in Partition. Many of the ethnic conflicts in the Northeast — when you grow up in Delhi, at least — seemed so complicated. But the moment you think about how everything has to do with borders cutting through communities, and with regions being overwhelmed by new migrants, suddenly all of its politics became clear overnight. That fog lifted. Saudamini Jain is an independent journalist. She lives in New Delhi.

Mint

an hour ago

• Mint

Kashmir's industries run on migrant labour. When they leave, everything stops.

Srinagar: Shahid Kamili still remembers the silence. On the morning of 5 August 2019, his steel plant in Srinagar's Rangreth industrial estate stood eerily still. The hot strip mills sat idle, the reheating furnace cold. Nearly 350 of his 500 workers, mostly migrant labourers, had vanished overnight. Just a day earlier, on 4 August, authorities had issued an urgent directive asking all non-local workers to leave the Kashmir Valley, ahead of the central government's move to revoke Article 370, stripping Jammu and Kashmir of its special constitutional status. By dawn, Kamili's Himalayan Rolling Steel Industries Pvt. Ltd, a ₹120-crore industrial unit, had come to a grinding halt. 'When 350 migrant workers left my steel factory in one go, I lost furnace technicians, mill fitters, and crane operators, the specialized labour needed to keep molten steel moving through the production line. No steel slabs were cast, no billets rolled, production stopped mid-cycle, and losses quickly piled up," recalls Kamili. In the months that followed, without skilled manpower to restart full-scale operations, Kamili's company slipped into financial distress. Like hundreds of other industrial units in the region, it was eventually classified as a non-performing asset. His experience underscores a vulnerability Kashmir's industries have lived with for decades: an overwhelming dependence on migrant workers from other Indian states to power its manufacturing, construction and horticulture sectors — and a recurring risk that political instability, violence or sudden government orders could drive them away, crippling production overnight. The migrant backbone of Kashmir's industries Industries in the Kashmir Valley have long battled political unrest, but one constant has been their reliance on migrant workers from Bihar, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Haryana, and Punjab. From cement plants and steel factories to cold storage units and oxygen plants, these workers fill a labour gap locals are often unwilling to close. For Malik Wajid Mushtaq, a 31-year-old entrepreneur, migrant labour keeps his ₹70-crore cold storage unit, Alpine Agro Fresh Pvt Ltd, running. At his facility in Lassipora, Pulwama — Kashmir's major manufacturing hub — 230 of his 300 workers are migrants handling apple grading, packing, and general labour, earning around ₹18,000 per month. 'Non-local workers are punctual and dedicated. We have tried hiring local labourers multiple times, but they often lack the same level of commitment. For instance, even a slight change in weather keeps them away. In contrast, migrant workers come here with a passion to work, to earn, and to succeed," says Mushtaq, an engineering graduate. At the Industrial Growth Centre (IGC) Lassipora, home to around 350 business units, nearly 15,000 non-local labourers are employed. Aircraft engineer-turned-entrepreneur Sarwar Hussain Malik, who runs a packaged mineral water unit there, calls migrant workers the 'lifeline of Kashmir's industrial sector." 'Kashmir mostly has small-scale industrial units, but we still lack sufficient skilled manpower to fill even those needs. From operating machines to managing production and repairing faults, it is the migrant workers who handle most of the critical tasks," says Malik. Read this | A fire, a mushroom, and Kashmir's vanishing spring According to the 2011 census, migrant labourers account for 80% of Kashmir's construction workforce, with an estimated 400,000-500,000 migrant workers currently employed across the region. Why locals stay away Despite steady industrial growth, convincing Kashmiri youth to join private-sector jobs remains difficult. Kamili, who also serves as president of the Federation Chamber of Industries Kashmir (FCIK), explains the dilemma. 'Such is the obsession with government jobs in the Valley that local youth prefer to work as daily wagers in government departments for a paltry salary of ₹6,000 to 8,000 per month, rather than earn ₹25,000 to 30,000 as labourers in the private sector." Shakeel Qalandar, a prominent industrialist, argues that to boost local participation, vocational training and skill development need urgent attention. 'Our educational centres need better infrastructure and updated technical courses that align with the needs of today's industries. Without this, the gap between job seekers and available industrial roles will only widen." Srinagar-based economist Ejaz Ayoub points to larger economic disparities driving this dynamic. 'Most of the workers who come here take up menial jobs that locals often avoid. They come from extremely poor backgrounds, and for them, even the low-end labour opportunities in Kashmir are worth the long travel and effort. In contrast, our local youth, especially in the construction sector, shows minimal participation." The underlying economics are stark. 'India has nearly 21% of its population below the poverty line, while J&K has only around 10.2%. That difference matters. In Kashmir, you do not see people sleeping on the footpaths or scrambling for daily bread. Most fall between the lower and middle-income groups. We are not very poor, and we are not very rich either, which is why many locals shy away from physically demanding or low-paying jobs. Every year, around 500,000-700,000 migrant workers arrive in J&K Union Territory to fill that gap and the local economy quietly relies on them," says Ayoub. Seasonal cycle of hardship Every spring, tens of thousands of workers descend on Kashmir for the brief construction season, taking up hard labour in masonry, carpentry, welding, and farming. As winter sets in, they return home. Mohammad Majeed, a mason from Bihar's Purnia district who has been working in Kashmir since 2020, says the Valley offers better conditions compared to other cities. 'The weather here is ideal. I have worked in Bengaluru and Delhi, but I prefer Kashmir. The wages are also higher. We earn around ₹1,200 a day here, while it is only ₹800 outside." For Majeed, who supports a dozen family members, discipline is key. 'I have never hired locals for the kind of work we do. They do not show up on time and can not work overtime when needed. For us, the focus is simply to work with dedication and efficiency to earn as much as possible." In Sangam, Kashmir's bat manufacturing industrial zone, Tara Singh, a craftsman from Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, who has been making cricket bats for eight years, highlights another reason for choosing Kashmir. 'We are respected and treated as any other dignified human being. Even in disturbed times I work without any hesitation and I am treated by people like their family members." The pattern repeats across sectors. At the brick kilns, Muzaffar Ahmad, a young entrepreneur, watches lorries packed with freshly made bricks roll out. 'The bricks that build Kashmir's houses are made by labourers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Working inside those kilns is not easy. It takes blood and sweat. The heat, the soot — it is work most locals simply avoid." Beyond construction, migrant workers are vital to Kashmir's orchards, paddy fields, and horticulture — the Valley's largest industry. The apple sector alone supports 3.5 million people and anchors the ₹8,000-crore horticultural economy. During harvest, migrants handle the plucking, grading, and packing of apples bound for national and international markets. Their labour fuels the journey of Kashmir's famous apples year after year. Fragile industries in a volatile region This reliance, however, comes at a cost. Periodic unrest and violence repeatedly disrupt the fragile system. According to data available with Mint, a total of 36 migrant workers were killed in Kashmir between 2019 and 2024. In one of the deadliest recent attacks, terrorists opened fire near a tunnel construction site in Ganderbal last October, killing six migrant workers and a local doctor. 'When the workers leave, industries are unable to resume production for months. During that time, losses accumulate, bank interest on loans continues to grow, and electricity demand charges also keep adding up. The fixed costs do not stop, even when operations do. For many units, it becomes unsustainable. Shutdowns follow, and industrialists are left buried in debt," says Kamili. The Valley's main industrial estates — Khunmoh, Rangreth, and Lassipora — are dotted with sick units where machinery lies idle and production lines have stalled for years. Some decades-old units, once run by migrant industrialists, remain abandoned since the 1990s insurgency forced owners to flee. Their rusting machinery and overgrown campuses stand as stark reminders of industrial decay. Also read | Death overs: After a century, Kashmir's batmakers could be run out Even today, Kashmir's Labour Commission estimates that around 400,000 non-local workers are employed across the region. But as one official admits, 'Despite their large numbers, the sector remains entirely unorganised, with no formal mechanisms for registration or oversight. The informal nature of this workforce makes it difficult to track their exact numbers or monitor their working conditions."