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Updated: Jun 11, 2015 01:23 IST

Pakistan warned India on Wednesday against pre-emptive strikes along the lines of the army's anti-insurgency operation in Myanmar, saying New Delhi should not have any misgivings about its nuclear-armed neighbour's military strength.

"We are not Myanmar. Don't you know our military strength? Pakistan is a nuclear nation. India should stop day dreaming," Pakistan's minister for defence production, Rana Tanveer Hussain, told HT in an exclusive interview from Islamabad.

"We don't believe in aggression but know how to respond to aggression. Don't even look at us with aggressive intent, and if you do, then you (India) are only living in a fool's paradise."

Hussain's comments come a day after minister of state for Information and Broadcasting Rajyavardhan Rathore took to Twitter to praise the operation against Northeastern insurgents, saying the raid inside Myanmar was a message to Pakistan and groups "harbouring terror intent towards India".

The rare cross-border military operation is being seen as part of a new resolve in New Delhi to fightterrorism beyond the country's borders -- in keeping with Prime Minister Narendra Modi's long-advocated tough stance on militancy, including the option of hot pursuit of rebels.

In Pakistan, a conference of formation commanders chaired by army chief Gen Raheel Sharif at the General Headquarters in Rawalpindi took "serious notice of the recent Indian hostile rhetoric coupled with covert and overt actions to destabilise Pakistan", said a statement from the military's media arm.

The commanders resolved to "defeat their designs and defend the territorial integrity of Pakistan at any cost with a befitting response to any misadventure against our country", the statement added.

"None should dare to cast an evil eye on Pak," chief military spokesperson Maj Gen Asim Bajwa said in a tweet.

Hours before the response from the civil and military leadership, Sartaj Aziz, the Pakistan Prime Minister's advisor on foreign affairs and national security, said Modi's remarks about Islamabad promoting terrorism had vitiated the atmosphere and contributed to "shrinking the constituency for peace". He made the remarks in the Senate, or upper house of parliament, while reacting to Modi's remarks in Bangladesh.

Pakistan, he said, will take up with the world community India's "interference in former East Pakistan" and its "policy of destabilising Pakistan through terrorism".



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