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Weeks after nuke warning, Rajnath Singh says India won’t balk at using strength to defend itself

Rajnath Singh had last month made an intriguing statement saying that India’s nuclear policy till date has been ‘No First Use’ but ‘what happens in future depends on the circumstances’.

Weeks after nuke warning, Rajnath Singh says India won’t balk at using strength to defend itself

Rajnath Singh is on a three-day official visit to South Korea in the second leg of a two-nation tour which also involved Japan. (Photo: Twitter | @rajnathsingh)

Union Defence Minister Rajnath Singh said that India will not balk at using its strength to defend itself, while addressing a defence dialogue in the South Korean capital of Seoul on Thursday.

Rajnath Singh is on a three-day official visit to South Korea in the second leg of a two-nation tour which also involved Japan. He was addressing a special session of the Seoul Defence Dialogue on Thursday, excerpts of which he shared on his twitter handle.

India has never been an aggressor in its history nor will it ever be. But that does not mean that India would balk at using its strength to defend itself, he said.

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“Defence diplomacy is a key pillar of India’s strategic toolkit. In fact, defence diplomacy and maintaining strong defence forces are two sides of the same coin. They go hand-in-hand,” the minister said in a series of tweets.

His comments come amidst tensions between India and Pakistan after the revocation of Article 370, that gave special status to Jammu and Kashmir.

Islamabad has been repeatedly trying to internationalise the Centre’s move to abrogate provisions of Article 370.

Singh had last week said that Pakistan has no locus standi on Kashmir and that “no country is backing it on the current issue”.

Addressing a Defence Research and Development Organisation event in Leh, Rajnath Singh questioned why Pakistan keeps crying over Kashmir when it never belonged to the country.

“Kashmir has always been a part of India,” he said, reiterating the Government’s stand.

Rajnath Singh had earlier said that should bilateral talks happen, it would not be about Jammu and Kashmir, but on Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, the territory under Pakistan’s control since it invaded the region in 1947.

Following Pakistan’s unilateral decisions of downgrading diplomatic ties with India, Rajnath Singh had made an intriguing statement saying that India’s nuclear policy till date has been ‘No First Use’ but “what happens in future depends on the circumstances”.

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