India and Pakistan: Peace Representations

Lord Bilimoria Excerpts

Thursday 17th July 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Bilimoria (CB)]

My Lords, last month, as co-chair of the India All-Party Parliamentary Group, I hosted a delegation of cross-party Members of Parliament from both houses of the Indian Parliament to the UK. They were sent by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to communicate to us the horrors of 22 April in Kashmir and the horrors that followed.

Similarly, Shashi Tharoor, a member of the Indian National Congress whom I have known for many years, led an all-party delegation to the United States. There, he said that there were three particular reasons for this situation and stated:

“The first is that we have had a 37-year pattern of repeated terror attacks from Pakistan accompanied by repeated denials … Pakistan didn’t know allegedly where Osama bin Laden was until he was found in a Pakistani safe house right next to an army camp in a cantonment city … Mumbai attacks, they denied having anything to do with it; one of the terrorists was captured alive, his name, his identity, his address in Pakistan, everything was revealed under interrogation. He told us where he was trained, what was done. The US intelligence as well as ours recorded the chilling voice of the Pakistani handler giving minute by minute instructions to the killers in Mumbai, telling them where to go and they were monitoring Indian TV and saying there are people hiding on the third floor of that hotel, go and shoot them there … they will deny, they did so until they are actually caught red handed”.


He went on to say that, secondly,

“within 45 minutes or so”

of this attack happening,

“a group called the Resistance Front claimed credit … It is a well-known proxy front of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, a banned terror organisation listed by the United Nations, listed by the US State Department”.

The third reason he gave was that,

“when the first strikes happened on the terrorist camps … funerals were conducted, including for members of some of the key … organisations, the Jaish-e-Mohammed in particular and the Lashkar-e-Taiba. The funerals were conducted and photographs emerged on social media showing Pakistani generals and police officers in uniform attending these funerals, being conducted by relatives of these terrorists. So we are looking at three concrete pieces of evidence as far as India is concerned”.

On 12 May, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said:

“During Operation Sindoor the world has again seen the ugly face of Pakistan, when top Pakistani army officers came to bid farewell to the slain terrorists. This is strong evidence of state-sponsored terrorism … The way the Pakistani army and Pakistan government are encouraging terrorism, it will destroy Pakistan one day … Terror and talks cannot go together”.


Climate change-driven water scarcity and sweltering summers have deepened resentment in Kashmir over the Indus Waters Treaty, with increasing support locally in Kashmir for its suspension. For example, Kashmir’s famed saffron, which depends on rains, has shrunk due to inadequate irrigation facilities. In Gulmarg, there was hardly any snow last year, when 70% of the Kashmiri population depends on farming and its mountain cultivators depend on water. China has gotten involved in this as well, and interventions from Beijing over the Indus Waters Treaty risk stirring up regional tensions. Does the Minister agree with this?

To conclude, India is now the largest south Asian country in the world by population. It is an oasis of democratic stability: since its independence in 1947, it has never had a coup and never had its Armed Forces interfering in its politics, unlike many of its neighbours. It has a robust democracy where people speak. It is now the fastest-growing major economy in the world, growing at over 6% a year, and is the fourth-largest economy in the world. I predict that, by 2060, it will be the largest economy in the world. It is not in India’s interests to have conflict with its neighbours, including Pakistan. India wants peace with its neighbours. It wants to get on with growing its economy, bettering the livelihood of its people and making a huge, positive contribution to the global community.