Foreign Desk Report
NEW YORK: Pakistan on Monday dismissed as “self-delusional” India’s claim to Jammu and Kashmir as its integral part, saying New Delhi’s shenanigans cannot deprive the Kashmiri people of their UN-pledged right to self-determination as set out in Security Council resolutions.
“The tired and trite rhetoric on Jammu and Kashmir is part of this self-delusional and unlimited Indian appetite for paddling alternative reality,” Pakistani delegate Saad Ahmad Warraich told the General Assembly as the 193-member body concluded its unfinished high-level meeting to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the United Nations.
“The truth is that Jammu and Kashmir is not part of India – it never was, it never will be,” he said in a sharp response to India’s statement on September 21 when the Assembly meeting was adjourned late at night to meet again to listen to the remaining speakers.
In that September meeting Indian delegate Vidisha Maitra, reacting to Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi strong espousal of Kashmir’s freedom from New Delhi’s yoke, accused him of interfering in the internal affairs of India and described Islamabad of being the “epicentre of terrorism.”
“We reject the malicious reference made to the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir, which is an integral part of India. If there is an item that is unfinished on the agenda of the UN, it is that of tackling the scourge of terrorism,” Maitra, the Indian delegate, had said. Exercising his right of reply on Monday when the anniversary meeting resumed, Warraich, a counsellor at the Pakistan to the UN, said, “It is beyond shameful that a country which misses no opportunity to flaunt its so-called credentials, has the temerity to question fundamental tenets of international law, including resolutions of the Security Council.
May I remind the Indian representative that it is the very same organ whose permanent membership India covets with such drooling ambition.” But, he said, he was not surprised not surprised as the international community was used to India’s “duplicitous behaviour.”
“After all, in a country where history can be rewritten to suit a ‘saffronized’ version of reality; where laws can be enacted with the sole objective to legitimize religious ‘discrimination’; where dissident voices can be cowed into obsequiousness and reputable human rights organizations such as Amnesty International can be brazenly forced to shut their operations,” the Pakistan delegate said.
