New Delhi: Two statements on Sunday, from the same government, describe the same problem from different ends.
External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar said the use of terrorism as an instrument of statecraft is simply unacceptable and can never be justified or rationalised. It continues, he said, because not all states really display zero tolerance to the menace, and because some still allow political calculations to take precedence over the lessons history offers. He did not name any country.
The phrasing matters. Calling it an instrument of statecraft is a specific charge — not that a group commits terrorism, but that a state uses it deliberately as policy. That is a harder claim to make and a harder one to answer.
Arriving at almost the same time was the advisory to Indian nationals in Saudi Arabia. The government asked them to abide by local rules and regulations and to refrain from filming or publishing information related to missile and drone interceptions.
The advisory comes amid escalating tension in the region, with a series of drone and missile attacks by Yemen's Houthis targeting civilian infrastructure.
There is a practical logic to the advisory that has nothing to do with politics. Filming an interception means holding a phone up toward the sky in a place where debris is falling, and publishing the footage can reveal what was intercepted, from where, and how well the defence held. Both the risk to the person filming and the risk to the defence system are real, and most Gulf states treat such material as restricted.
For the roughly nine million Indians who live and work in the Gulf, advisories of this kind are read closely. They are usually the earliest signal that a government expects a situation to worsen rather than settle.
The Ministry of External Affairs has not said how long the advisory will remain in force.
Jaishankar's remarks were made at an event in the capital. He did not elaborate on which states he had in mind.