External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar made the case on Monday that Operation Sindoor was authorised under the Security Council statement demanding action against those who carried out the Pahalgam massacre.
The Council statement on April 25 "demanded that its perpetrators be held accountable and brought to justice", Jaishankar said. "We have since seen that happen."
Operation Sindoor took out the terrorist site and leaders hosted by Pakistan who were behind terrorist attacks, before Islamabad decided to escalate it.
"What that response underlines is of larger significance, the message of zero tolerance for terrorism," he said.
Jaishankar was speaking at the inauguration of the exhibition, The Human Cost of Terrorism, at the UN.
The interactive digital exhibition comes a day ahead of Pakistan becoming the president of the Council for the month of July and will be the first thing top diplomats coming into the UN building will see.
It portrays 40 years of terrorism from the 1985 downing of Air India flight by Canada-based terrorists to the Pahalgam killings by The Resistance Front, an affiliate of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba.
The 29 incidents on display take a panoramic view of the horrors across continents, from the 9/11 attack on the US and the London bombings in 2005 to the 2003 Baghdad attacks, the 2002 Bali attack and the Crocus City Hall killings last year in Moscow.
Jaishankar did not directly mention Operation Sindoor or Pakistan, but the reference to the Council statement made clear what he was referring to.
The statement said: "The members of the Security Council underlined the need to hold perpetrators, organisers, financiers, and sponsors of this reprehensible act of terrorism accountable and bring them to justice."
It added that the Council "members stressed that those responsible for these killings should be held accountable, and urged all states, in accordance with their obligations under international law and relevant Security Council resolutions, to cooperate actively with all relevant authorities in this regard".
Pakistan, an elected member of the Council, signed on to the statement that was issued unanimously because of the pressure from the other members.
Explaining the rationale for the exhibition, Jaishankar said that terrorism is the antithesis of what the UN stands for and when terrorism is supported by a state against its neighbour, and when "the bigotry of extremism drives a whole host of illegal activities, it is imperative to call it out".
"One way of doing so is to display the havoc it has wreaked on the global society", he said.
"Today's exhibition is not merely a presentation of images, videos and histories, it is a statement of our shared responsibilities" to fight terrorism, he added.
India’s Permanent Representative P Harish said the exhibition "is a statement of our shared humanity to the gallery of human courage, each moment, each memory, each artefact and every word tells the story of ... ordinary men and women".
Picture Courtesy: IANS