Terrorism biggest global challenge, says Sushma

Justifying India’s bid to focus on terror in the just-concluded BRICS summit in Goa, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj said that state-sponsored terrorism now posed the biggest global challenge.

The international community could only ignore it at its own peril, Sushma added.“(The) BRICS has always been global in its approach and today, there is no bigger global challenge than state-sponsored and state-protected terrorism,” Swaraj said on Tuesday. She was inaugurating a BRICS media forum.

Her comment came two days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi hosted the 8th summit of the BRICS — a bloc comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — in Goa.

“While our economic engagement and political cooperation remained key factors in BRICS, there was a sharp realisation that global development and prosperity was very much dependent on continued peace and security,” the external affairs minister said referring to the discussion in the summit of the five-nation bloc.

The BRICS held its summit in Goa less than a month after the Uri attack. The terrorists, who carried out the attack on an Indian Army camp, had sneaked into India from areas under the control of Pakistan. Altogether 19 soldiers of the Indian Army were killed in the attack, which escalated tension between India and Pakistan. New Delhi was obviously keen to get the bloc strongly denounce terrorism.

“Terrorism was universally recognised as a key threat to stability, progress and development. Consequently, it featured strongly in the conference narrative and its eventual outcome,” Sushma said.

During the summit in Goa, the prime minister repeatedly drew the attention of the other BRICS leaders — President Xi Jinping of China, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, President Michel Temer of Brazil and President Jacob Zuma of South Africa — to the fact that the epicentre of terror was in the neighbourhood of India.

The “Goa Declaration”, however, avoided a direct reference to “cross-border terror”, even as it did remind all nations of their responsibilities to “prevent terrorist actions from their territories”.

“There is a developing consensus that it cannot be business as usual. We must be prepared to extract costs for those who sponsor and support terrorists, who provide them sanctuary, and who, despite their own claimed victim-hood, continue to make the false distinction between good and bad terrorists,” said Swaraj.