PM Modi addresses nation during 79th Independence Day.

NEW DELHI: On India’s 79th Independence Day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, addressing the nation from the Red Fort, had a message for Pakistan – India will treat terrorists and those who aid them as one, and any future misadventure will meet decisive retribution at the hands of its armed forces. Praising the military, PM Modi said the operation had inflicted heavy losses on Pakistan, with new evidence of the damage surfacing daily. He reaffirmed that India would not bow to Islamabad’s “nuclear blackmail.” “What our forces achieved in Operation Sindoor has not been witnessed in decades,” PM Modi said. “We have set a new normal in tackling cross-border terrorism. I salute our brave soldiers who delivered a punishment for the Pahalgam attack far beyond the enemy’s imagination.”PM Modi said that India and its farmers have sole rights over the country’s share of the Indus river waters, branding the Indus Water Treaty with Pakistan as “unjust and one-sided.” PM Modi said the decades-old agreement had caused “enormous harm” to Indian agriculture, allowing rivers originating in India to irrigate “the fields of our enemies” while leaving Indian soil and farmers parched. “Blood and water cannot flow together,” he said, adding that the recent terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam, which killed 26 people. “The waters that belong to India will be used by India, for India’s farmers alone. We will not tolerate any arrangement that deprives them. This agreement is unacceptable to us,” PM Modi said. Signed in 1960 under World Bank mediation, the treaty has governed the sharing of the Indus and its tributaries between India and Pakistan. Modi said India’s farmers had endured “unimaginable losses” for decades under it — a situation his government would no longer accept.