On October 21, an Indian diplomat did something unusual in New York: he publicly corrected a United Nations Special Rapporteur on a matter of fact. Ben Saul, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, had described Dawood Ibrahim’s D-Company in his July report as “India-based”. First Secretary Raghoo Puri of India’s Permanent Mission set the record straight. Dawood, he said, “fled India much before the 2003 listing” and, “as per the UN’s listing entry, resides in the same country where Osama Bin Laden was found and neutralised.”
The same week, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar told the NDTV World Summit how India intends to deal with terrorism, whatever Washington thinks: “Get it right yourself. If you don’t have the clarity of thought, the conviction to fight back against terrorism, don’t think somebody else is going to do that job for you.”
These are two expressions of a single doctrine. India now treats counter-terrorism as a domain of strategic autonomy: it acts on Indian conviction, defends the record on Indian terms, and does not wait for any partner’s permission or understanding. That doctrine is now being tested by Washington’s transactional outreach to Pakistan.
The UN Security Council’s own narrative summary for the 1267 sanctions listing records that Dawood Ibrahim was listed on November 3, 2003, and that he is wanted in India in connection with the March 12, 1993, Bombay bombings, which killed more than 250 people
The UN as a Battleground of Narrative
The documented facts first. The UN Security Council’s own narrative summary for the 1267 sanctions listing records that Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar was listed on November 3, 2003, and that he is wanted in India in connection with the March 12, 1993, Bombay bombings, which killed more than 250 people. It also records that he used his position in the Indian underworld to support Al-Qaida and related groups and shared smuggling routes with Osama bin Laden’s network. And the CIA’s own account of the operation confirms that bin Laden was killed in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, roughly 35 miles north of Islamabad, in the early hours of May 2, 2011.
Against that record, Puri’s complaint was precise. The rapporteur’s line about the 2003 listing, he said, “read in isolation”, “paints a very different picture from the actual reality.” Omitting that Dawood has been wanted in India for terror attacks since 1993 was, in his words, “regrettable”, and “such incompetence on part of special mandate holders does this organisation tremendous harm.” He went further, noting “the clear bias in different parts of the report” and warning that “it seems to have become fashionable for sponsors of terror to use human rights and the framework of counter-terrorism to justify their misdeeds.”
Now the inference. The error was not a slip of geography. To call D-Company “India-based” inverts the map of victimhood: it relocates the perpetrator to the victim’s homeland and erases the 1993 Mumbai blasts from the story. In the UN system, reports become reference texts, and reference texts become the basis of resolutions. India’s correction was therefore a defence of narrative sovereignty. Puri did not wait for a friendly capital to raise the matter on India’s behalf. He did it himself.
None of this is hostility to Pakistan’s people. India, Jaishankar said, wants good relations with all its neighbours, “but will I overlook terror for that? I will not.” The obstacle is Islamabad’s use of terrorism as an instrument of state policy
The Abbottabad reference is devastating precisely because it is factual. Pakistan’s harbouring of the world’s most wanted men is not an Indian allegation; it is a documented pattern, attested by Washington’s own intelligence history. India has said this for years. Puri simply put it in the UN record again.
The Doctrine: Conviction, Not Comprehension
Jaishankar’s NDTV remarks were a direct response to the perception that Pakistan’s military establishment has won over the Trump administration. His answer rejected the premise that American “understanding” decides Indian action. “It’s not all about Washington understanding or not understanding,” he said. “If Washington understood it so well, why didn’t we act in 2008, when 26/11 happened?”
That question is the core of the doctrine. After 26/11, India did not act, and, as Jaishankar put it, “the world watched what we did after the attack, and because we did nothing, the world drew its lessons.” The government’s later answers, from the Balakot strikes to Operation Sindoor, were not responses to American comprehension but to Indian conviction. His formulation was crisp: “When you respond, the world will take note of it. When you don’t respond, the world will play games.”
Marco Rubio says the US must engage Pakistan because “it’s a country that possesses nuclear weapons” and because, “from a geographic standpoint, we need to be able to interact with them,” drawing a parallel with the way India “has a relationship and meets with leaders from Iran”
None of this is hostility to Pakistan’s people. India, Jaishankar said, wants good relations with all its neighbours, “but will I overlook terror for that? I will not.” The obstacle is Islamabad’s use of terrorism as an instrument of state policy.
Washington’s Nuclear Rationalisation
Into this arrives Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s defence of America’s Pakistan policy. Speaking to News18, he argued that the United States must engage Pakistan because “it’s a country that possesses nuclear weapons” and because, “from a geographic standpoint, we need to be able to interact with them”, drawing a parallel with the way India “has a relationship and meets with leaders from Iran.” Such engagement, he said, “perhaps puts us in a position to help discourage the kinds of things that India is worried about.” He also stressed that this would not come at the expense of ties with India, and he laid a wreath at the 26/11 memorial in Mumbai to underline shared counter-terrorism commitments.
The gesture in Mumbai was welcome. The argument is not new. It is the great-power rationalisation that has governed American policy towards Pakistan for half a century, and India’s experience is the test of it. If engagement were enough to “discourage” terrorism, 26/11 would not have happened after decades of American aid, training and partnership with Rawalpindi. The lesson of that history is that engagement without consequences is the problem, not the solution. A nuclear-armed state that shelters men wanted for mass murder is not deterred by being courted.
The India-Iran parallel fails: India’s dealings with Tehran are not a shield for terror groups attacking American cities. Washington’s engagement with Pakistan, by contrast, has repeatedly coexisted with the presence of the world’s most wanted terrorists on Pakistani soil, from Abbottabad to Dawood’s listing
The India–Iran parallel also fails. India’s dealings with Tehran are not a shield for terror groups attacking American cities. Washington’s engagement with Pakistan, by contrast, has repeatedly coexisted with the presence of the world’s most wanted terrorists on Pakistani soil, from Abbottabad to Dawood’s listing.
Autonomy as Leverage, and What India Should Demand
The broader pattern matters. India is not asking Washington to understand it. It is telling Washington that India’s actions at the UN, on the border and in diplomacy will proceed on Indian terms. That is the same logic behind India’s energy choices on Russian oil and its security conditions for foreign satellite networks such as Starlink: no partner defines India’s interests. Inference, not fact: a confident India gains leverage precisely because it no longer needs American approval to act.
What should India watch and demand? First, accountability at the UN. India should press for the rapporteur’s report to be corrected formally, so that the “India-based” error does not become settled language. Second, consequences for Pakistan. Washington’s outreach should be measured by concrete action against listed terrorists, not by declarations of good intent. Third, consistency from Washington. If Rubio’s engagement truly helps “discourage” terrorism, the proof will be in arrests, extraditions and the dismantling of sanctuaries, not in wreaths and interviews.
India has learned the hard way that no one else will fight its war on terror for it. The doctrine now has a name, and its author has stated it plainly: get it right yourself.
The writer is an expert on geopolitics, national security, and counter-terrorism; and he regularly contributes his subject thought-leadership and academic commentary with several publications in newspapers, journals, and periodicals. He works with investigative agencies, regulatory bodies, financial institutions and enterprises, providing strategic and regulatory advisory. The views expressed are personal and do not necessarily carry the views of Raksha Anirveda
