ISLAMABAD, July 10: Speakers at a dialogue on “Peace in South Asia” slated the policy of coercive diplomacy adopted by the Indians by amassing troops on borders.

“At the moment India is ruled by the extremist elements,” said the minister for information and media development, Nisar Memon, and expressed surprise at the much trumpeted democracy and secularism, which encourages the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat at the hands of the Hindu majority to which scant attention is paid by the Indian government, and attempts at discussing the matter in the Parliament results in confusion and pandemonium in the House.

He said results in many provincial elections in India showed that the BJP government had been rejected by a majority of people. He wondered as to why India did not allow international media to visit Kashmir. He asked the intellectuals to tell Indian thinking public to inform their leadership that in Pakistan minorities were well protected unlike Muslims in India.

He said he failed to understand as to how the killers of Abdul Ghani Lone were allowed to go scot-free in spite of the tight security that the Indians have in Kashmir.

The minister said the talk of waiting till October and December was a ploy to hold the so-called election by coercive means in Kashmir. “One of the leaders of the APHC had been murdered and other two leaders put in jail precisely for this purpose”, he said.

The talk of fighters from Pakistan or anywhere else was absurd as it was an indigenous struggle of the Kashmiris for their right to self-determination. We have always desired peace and right from Agra to Almaty the world has noted this effort, he said.

He spoke of the recently held conference of the Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC), foreign ministers in Khartoum, and “even those delegates who did not mention specifically in their speeches endorsed Pakistan’s view of holding a dialogue. Kashmir was mentioned in the joint communique, resolutions and the charter.”

Many speakers emphasized on the importance of democratic set up in establishing peace. The minister rejected it by saying, the country was on the way to elections and what more democracy could be in practice today, in a military dispensation the papers can criticize the government in any manner that they liked. Speaking of the army taking over the affairs of the country, he said he remembered the PNA agitation when political leaders demanded the army to take over the administration of the country.— Mufti Jamiluddin Ahmad