The government yesterday reiterated that Kashmir was solely an internal affair.
The government’s response came following reports that Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was convening a cabinet meeting over the situation in Kashmir.
The Pakistan Foreign Office also briefed ambassadors of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council on Kashmir.
“Terrorism is terrorism. No amount of parsing and justification on the part of Pakistan is going to change it,” External Affairs Ministry spokesman Vikas Swarup said in his weekly media briefing here.
At least 38 people have died in large-scale violence in Jammu and Kashmir following the killing of top Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani, 22, in a gunfight on July 8 along with two of his associates.
“Our internal affairs are solely ours to handle.” Swarup said.
“Any effort by any other party, claiming it as theirs or trying to interfere and seeking to internationalise the issue will not change it.”
The spokesman said the “world today has a clear view of which country in our region covets the territory of others, uses terrorism as a matter of state policy, provides sanctuary to UN designated terrorists and terrorist groups and violates human rights.”
“In so far as prospect of dialogue with Pakistan, India has never shied away from dialogue with Pakistan,” he said.
“However, it is incumbent on Pakistan to create the right atmosphere for a productive dialogue to take place. Talks and terror cannot go hand in hand.”
In response to another question, Swarup said the Indian High Commissioner was also summoned by the Pakistan Foreign Office on July 11 and a demarche was made on him on the situation in Kashmir.
“Our High Commissioner had responded that the matter is a domestic issue, internal to India and that Pakistan has no locus standi in the matter,” he said.
“The High Commissioner also stated that India rejects the demarche. For the same reason that this is a domestic issue, internal to India, we see no reason to involve Pakistan, which has no locus standi in the matter.” he added.
Meanwhile, in a sharp rebuke to Pakistan for raising the Kashmir issue at the UN, India has denounced it as a country that uses terrorists and provides them sanctuary and said Islamabad’s cynical efforts to internationalise the dispute has fallen flat.
Calling its reference to Kashmir an “attempt at misuse” of the UN platform, India’s Permanent Representative Syed Akbaruddin said: “The attempt came from Pakistan, a country that covets the territory of others; a country that uses terrorism as state policy towards that misguided end; a country that extols the virtues of terrorists and that provides sanctuary to UN-designated terrorists; and a country that masquerades its efforts as support for human rights and self-determination.”
Earlier at a high-level UN General Assembly debate, Pakistan’s Permanent Representative Maleeha Lodhi accused India of human rights violations in Kashmir and of carrying out an “extra-judicial killing of a person” she described as a “Kashmiri leader,” a reference to Wani.
Lodhi said Indian forces were resorting to “brutal acts to suppress the right to self-determination of the people of Kashmir.”
Akbaruddin drew attention to Islamabad’s defeat last December in its re-election bid for the Human Rights Council as a sign of the loss of its credibility.
“Pakistan is the same country whose track record has failed to convince the international community to gain membership of the Human Rights Council in this very session of the UNGA.”
A soldier looks on outside the civil secretariat, the seat of power in Jammu and Kashmir, during a meeting of the Unified Headquarters (UHQ) to discuss the ongoing unrest in the state, in Srinagar yesterday. The UHQ, formed in 1993, brings together politicians, civil and military agencies to co-ordinate responses to insurgency-related unrest in the state.
