-SAPM reveals Delhi has contacted Islamabad for restarting bilateral dialogue
-Says Islamabad’s agreement to dialogue would be conditional
-Pakistan conditions include release of political prisoners, ending HR abuses in IoK, including Kashmiris as third party to talks
DM Monitoring
ISLAMABAD: Dr Moeed Yusuf, the special adviser to the prime minister on national security, has said the Indian government has recently reached out to Pakistan, expressing a desire to resume bilateral dialogue.
In the first interview to any Indian publication by a government official following the Indian annexation of illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir in August last year, Yusuf, during a conversation with Indian journalist Karan Thapar, said Islamabad’s agreement to dialogue would be “conditional”.
“The conditions include the immediate release of occupied Kashmir’s political prisoners, lifting of the heavy military siege from the territory, the reversal of New Delhi’s decision to strip the region of its special status, ending human rights violations in the valley and a stop to India’s state-sponsored terrorism against Pakistan,” he said.
He further added that the talks would have to have a democratic approach to the Kashmir issue, remarking that “Democratic societies do not bring in 180,000 troops to change the status of a territory.”
Responding to a question, Yusuf said “no decision has been made” regarding granting Gilgit-Baltistan a provincial status but added that the matter was the subject of “public debate”.
He further added that this debate had been generated by the people of GB, and that the indigenous citizens had themselves been saying “We want to be fully integrated with Pakistan”.
“Now you tell me, Karan, if people are not treated well, would they ever want that? I’ve never heard the Kashmiri Muslims talk about this in the occupied territory,” Yusuf said. He also added that the results of the debate would follow the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council and that there would be no “permanent change of territorial status”.
Agencies add: Special Assistant to the Prime Minister (SAPM) on National Security Dr Moeed Yusuf on Tuesday revealed that New Delhi has sent a message expressing a desire for talks on Kashmir issue. In an interview with the Indian journalist Karan Thapar, the PM’s aide made it clear that Pakistan is ready for talks with India if it acknowledges Kashmiris as a principal party during the dialogue.
Moeed Yusuf maintained that the dialogues with India were impossible without ending the one-year-long military siege and atrocities on innocent Kashmiris. Moeed Yusuf asked India to normalize the situation in occupied Kashmir for dialogues. He was of the view that Pakistan is committed to peace in the region but the Indian government’s Hindutva and anti-Muslim policies were major threat to peace.
Moeed Yusuf said, “Pakistan stands for peace and we want to move forward”. Responding to a question, he said, “Kashmiris hate India.” Moeed Yusuf maintained that Kashmiris are not ready to live under Indian occupation and India must reverse the military siege in Kashmir and roll back the new citizenship Act.
Yusuf maintained that India is behind terror attacks in Pakistan and Pakistan has enough evidence to suggest that in 2019 the Indian Embassy in Kabul had given $1 million to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan to help the TTP merge with four militant groups.
He added that the handler of the 2014 Peshawar Army Public School attack was in touch with “an Indian consulate”, adding that Pakistan has the phone number of the handler’s contact. Yusuf also told the Indian journalist that the Indian Embassy in Afghanistan is using think-tanks as a front to funnel money to terrorists operating in Balochistan. When asked why PM Imran had never raised his voice for the Uighur community in China that was being persecuted by the Chinese government, the SAPM said: “China and Pakistan are friends like no other. We have a completely transparent relationship; virtually everything under the sky, we discuss.
“Uighurs is a non-issue Our delegations have visited, we’ve seen and we are a 100 per cent satisfied that it’s a non-issue. The West can say what it wants. I am telling you as a responsible official: we know everything we need to know about the Uighurs and everything else in China as they do about us.”
Thapar quoted an interview PM Imran gave to the Financial Times last year, where the premier had said: “Frankly, I don’t know much about” the Uighur issue. Yusuf, however, continued to insist that the matter was a non-issue and said that he had briefed the prime minister about it. Yusuf also discussed the case of Indian spy Kulbhushan Jadhav, who was convicted by a military court in 2017.
He told Thapar that the Pakistani government had granted India consular access to Jadhav as per the International Court of Justice’s verdict but that the Indian government was “dragging its feet” over the matter of appointing a legal representative. He further said that Pakistan had complied with the ICJ verdict and lamented that court proceedings could not be started because India has yet to appoint a lawyer to get relevant documents. He told Thapar that the Pakistani government was waiting for India to accept Pakistan’s offer for a third consular access.
While responding to a question regarding New Delhi’s allegations that Pakistan sponsors terrorism in India, Yusuf said that the Indian side had pushed a “one-sided narrative for at least two decades” since 9/11 attacks. The premier’s aide said that in 2019, more than a billion US dollars from the Indian embassy funds had been used for the merger of Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan with other terrorist outfits. “Congratulations to the RAW. They have succeeded in creating an organisation to kill Pakistanis,” he said.
The terrorist was also treated at a New Delhi hospital in 2017, Yusuf added. The premier’s assistant said that the government had records of phone calls, phone numbers of people who orchestrated the APS attack from a third country. Yusuf said that Islamabad has “evidence to a T” that India was sponsoring terrorism in Pakistan, adding that the Indian government was “using Afghanistan’s” territory in its schemes.
