India and the United Kingdom recently held the 14th meeting of the India-United Kingdom Joint Working Group on Counter-Terrorism. The meeting was held virtually on January 21-22, 2021.
Highlights
- Under the meeting, both the nations strongly condemned the terrorism in all its forms and manifestations.
- Both the countries emphasized on the demand of strengthening the international cooperation so that they could combat the global problem of terrorism completely besides combating the cross-border terrorism in South Asia.
- The countries reviewed the threats by the United Nations prescribed terrorist entities and terrorist.
- Both of the countries also exchanged their views on the assessment of the terrorist entities and individuals as a tool to counter the terrorism.
- They also exchanged the ideas in order to further strengthen the bilateral cooperation to combat the counter-terrorism, extremism & radicalization, financing of terrorism, preventing the internet exploitation for terrorism, information sharing, cooperation between law enforcement, capacity building and maritime & aviation security.
- Further, the challenges faced to counter the terrorism in the COVID-19 pandemic situation were also discussed.
- Both the countries concluded by asking the other nations to take an immediate step in order to ensure that no territory under their control has been used for terrorist activities. They also asked the nations that, if any attack executes from a particular territory, the respective nation must take actions against it.
India-UK counter terrorism cooperation
Both the nations have showed and shared a strong interest in preventing terror attacks on their mainland. They have suffered such attacks such as a terrorist attack on British soil in London on July 7 2005 and Mumbai attack on 26-28 November in 2008. In the line, the Prime Minister Modi during visit to the UK in November 2015, he explicitly named Lashkar-e-Taiba for the Mumbai attack. In the 13th meeting of the India-UK Joint Working Group on Counter-Terrorism in London on 25-26 November 2019, both the countries had committed to work together to counter the terrorism in all its forms.