Chennai: External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Friday made it clear that India will exercise the right to defend her people against a bad neighbour.
“You can also have bad neighbours. Unfortunately, we do. When you have bad neighbours, if you look to the one to the west, if a country decides that it will deliberately, persistently, and unrepentantly continue with terrorism, we have a right to defend our people against terrorism. We will exercise that right,” Jaishankar said at the IIT Madras in an obvious reference to Pakistan.
Interacting with students after launching the IIT Madras Global Research Foundation, the Minister, said, “How we exercise that right [to defend] is up to us. Nobody can tell us what we should or should not do. We will do whatever we have to do to defend ourselves.”
Adverting to the suspension of the Indus Water Treaty, he explained, the water-sharing agreement was reached many years ago. “...but if you had decades of terrorism, there is no good neighbourliness. If there is no good neighbourliness, you don’t get the benefits of that good neighbourliness,” he said. The Minister made it clear, under such circumstances one cannot say, “‘Please share water with me, but I will continue terrorism with you.’ That's not reconcilable.”
According to him, if you have a neighbour who is good to you or at least who is not harmful to you, your natural instinct is to be kind, to help that neighbour, “and that’s what we do as a country.”
