NEW DELHI: Congress MP and former diplomat Shashi Tharoor, who is leading an all-party delegation to the United States, on Wednesday described Operation Sindoor as a deeply symbolic and culturally resonant response to the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack, saying that the mission was India’s way of delivering “sindoor ka badla khoon”, blood in return for the sindoor wiped from the foreheads of widowed Indian women in J&K’s Pahalgam.Speaking in a presser, Tharoor said the name “Operation Sindoor” was deliberately chosen to convey both cultural meaning and national resolve.“Operation Sindoor, actually, I thought was a brilliantly chosen name. Sindoor, in case some Americans obviously don’t know about this, is a vermilion mark that is applied to the centre of the forehead of married women in the Hindu tradition,” he said.Detailing the brutal nature of the Pahalgam attack, Tharoor added, “We were very conscious of these brutal terrorists who, by the way, shot men in front of their wives and children but spared the women, and when one wife screamed out, ‘Kill me too,’ she was told, ‘No, you go back and tell them what we’ve done.’”“That sindoor had essentially been wiped off the foreheads of 26 Indian women… so we wanted first of all, to avenge that act of wiping off the sindoor. But, secondly, it’s no accident that the colour of the sindoor is bright vermilion red, which is not far from the colour of blood, and in many ways there is a Hindi expression that ‘khoon ka badla khoon’; here it was ‘sindoor ka badla khoon’ hoga,” he said.On the operational front, Tharoor highlighted the precision and scale of India’s military strikes. “There’ve been craters on the runway, operational command centers have been busted by these Indian bombs. Just yesterday, the Pakistanis publicly admitted that Indian strikes were so wide-ranging and effective they struck from as far as Hyderabad in South Pakistan to Peshawar in the northwest,” he said.Tharoor emphasised that the delegation’s visit is aimed at presenting a united Indian stand against terrorism and educating the international community on the motivations behind India’s counterterror action.“This is not about party politics. We are here to speak for a united India, to explain clearly what Operation Sindoor stands for and why the country responded the way it did,” he said.