Minister of State for External Affairs VK Singh on Wednesday claimed that opposition parties, student leaders, actors, journalists and several others critical of the government were the reason why India had failed to emulate Israel in targeting terrorists. In a Facebook post, Singh said there was a need for “surgical strikes” within the country to weed out the “robbers who are ready to loot”.

Singh wrote that people of the country want revenge and were expecting that Prime Minister Narendra Modi would enter Pakistan in a tank and finish off all Pakistanis. “We want to be in Israel mode overnight,” he said. “But it won’t happen.”

Singh expressed faith in the government and said the country would take revenge with Modi at the helm. “It [revenge] will be fierce and a 100 times more intense,” he said. “But India cannot be Israel and will not be Israel.”

The former Army chief said that unlike opposition leaders in India, those in Israel do not question and insult the Army when it eliminates terrorists. Several Opposition parties have demanded proof of the cross-border strike conducted by the Indian Air Force on February 26 and the number of terrorists killed in the operation.

Israel does not have an institution like the Jawaharlal Nehru University, where students can scream slogans in support of breaking the country up, he said, referring to the alleged anti-national protests in the university in February 2016.

“There are no leeches [in Israel] like Shehla Rashid and Kanhaiya Kumar who study on taxpayers’ money and call the Army rapists,” he said.

Israel does not open its courts for terrorists at 2 am, wrote the minister of state for external affairs. He was referring to the Supreme Court hearing arguments in a fresh petition filed by Yakub Memon, accused of the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts, at 2.30 am. Singh claimed journalists in Israel don’t “cry” for human rights of terrorists. He also targeted “actors who are ashamed of and see intolerance in the same country where they were born”.

Singh said that India becoming like Israel is the need of the hour, which would give elected representatives the belief that India will remain united to protect its sovereignty and integrity. “Otherwise, the country will keep getting hurt again and again,” he said.

In a separate incident on Wednesday, Singh also said opposition leaders questioning the strike in Pakistan “should be tied at the bottom of the aircraft. “When the bomb is dropped, they can look at the target themselves, and then they can be dropped there, so that they can count and return,” he said.

Singh had also criticised Congress leader Digvijaya Singh, who had used the word “accident” to describe the February 14 Pulwama suicide bombing in which 40 Central Reserve Police Force jawans were killed. Calling a terrorist attack an accident “should not be the political discourse in our country,” Singh had said, accusing the Opposition of weakening the nation “with these senseless jibes”.