NEW DELHI: External affairs minister S Jaishankar on Tuesday slammed Pakistan’s role in promoting terrorism, calling out Islamabad’s double-dealing in Afghanistan and its continued “bad habits”.
He also remarked that the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks had been a major turning point in India-Pakistan relations. “India has changed. I wish I could say Pakistan has changed. They unfortunately, in many ways, are continuing their bad habits. I would say the 26/11 Mumbai terrorist attack was the turning point. I think that was when the Indian public, across political parties, said this is too much.”
“People felt that the country (India) cannot accept this behaviour from a neighbour. I think that feeling was very very strong in society, but it may not have been entirely understood at that time by the Government at that time, which is a different matter,” he added.
“Pakistan played a double game in Afghanistan. On one hand, it was ostensibly supporting the Americans and on the other, it was supporting the Taliban,” Jaishankar said during an interactive session with students at Charotar University of Science and Technology (CHARUSAT) in Anand, Gujarat.
He further added, “The terrorism industry promoted by Pakistan eventually came back to bite it.”
Addressing the students, Jaishankar linked national progress to academic excellence. “As someone who has lived in eight countries and travelled to more than 100 countries… when we talk about any nation rising, the one metric of judging a nation is the state of its universities. You cannot be a great nation if your universities are not great,” he said.