New Delhi:
The colour of sindoor is not very different from the colour of blood spilt by the perpetrators of the Pahalgam terror attack, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor told a Saudi Arabian news channel while explaining why the name of India’s counterstrike, Operation Sindoor, has struck a chord.
Mr Tharoor was speaking with Al Arabiya, a Saudi Arabian news channel, on the India-Pakistan tension when asked why the name, Operation Sindoor, was significant.
Sindoor, he said, is the vermilion mark married women put in the parting of their hair. “The image that was seared into the nation’s consciousness after the terrorist attack in Pahalgam was of a newly wedded — now newly widowed — bride on her honeymoon kneeling disconsolately by the body of her slain husband, in other words, the terrorist attack had wiped the sindoor of her forehead as only married women wear it,” Mr Tharoor said, referring to the heartbreaking image of Himanshi Narwal, wife of Indian Navy officer Lieutenant Vinay Narwal, who was killed in the terror attack days after his wedding. Twenty four other tourists and a Kashmiri man were killed in the attack.
Indian Member of Parliament for Lok Sabha @ShashiTharoor says #India‘s “Operation Sindoor” is a powerful name that evokes the grief of a newly widowed bride—turning a symbol of marriage into a reminder of bloodshed and loss. #Pakistan #GNT pic.twitter.com/sWroFJFjMc
— Al Arabiya English (@AlArabiya_Eng) May 9, 2025
“It (Operation Sindoor) was a very emotive, emotional term to remind people of what had happened and why this action was necessary, of that innocent civilians, including this young woman and a few other women who were widowed in the process of the same attacks, had experienced,” Mr Tharoor said. “I might add, there is also undoubtedly the evocative thought that the colour of sindoor is not that different from the colour of blood and that was what was spilt by the terrorists in our country. I thought it was a very, very evocative, emotional and powerful choice to name the operation that way,” the four-time MP from Thiruvananthapuram said.
Earlier, Mr Tharoor had said the operation’s name is “brilliant”. “Shabash to whoever thought of it.”
The Congress MP has been articulating India’s position in his interviews with international news outlets. Pakistan, he said, is a “master of denial”. “They denied anything to do with the Mumbai attacks that killed 170 people on 26/11/2008 until one of the terrorists was caught alive and Pakistanis had to admit that he and everything he said came from them. They denied even knowing where Osama Bin Laden was until he was found in a military encampment not far from a Pakistani Army base. This is the Pakistani route: constantly show us the evidence. The fact is there is enough circumstantial evidence and there are intelligence intercepts on the basis of which India is acting. India has absolutely no other reason to do this,” he said during the Al Arabiya interview.
India, he said, is a “status quo” power and “wants nothing that Pakistan has”. “It is focused on growing its economy, improving its high technology, and providing a future for its young people. It is entirely happy to be left alone by Pakistan and it will leave Pakistan alone. Pakistan is a revisionist power, it claims territories India holds. It is a bigoted power that wishes to take over parts of India on the grounds that the people living there happen to share the same religion as the Pakistanis. Well, there are 200 million Indian Muslims who share the same religion as the Pakistanis. Do they want to take them all over? It is a preposterous approach that the Pakistanis have been adopting. They have been deploying terrorists for 30 years in pursuit of their desire to ‘bleed India by a thousand cuts’ and to capture the territory of Kashmir. They are not going to get it,” he said.
