MUZAFFARABAD: An Azad Jammu and Kashmir minister has criticised the Indian government for its refusal to allow the United Nations and international aid agencies to carry out rescue and relief work in flood-hit areas of held Kashmir, and urged Islamabad to take up the matter at the international level.

“Reports reaching here from across the Line of Control depict a sorry state of affairs. Hundreds of thousands of people are still marooned but the Indian government is callously overlooking their plight,” Minister for Finance and Planning and Development Chaudhry Latif Akbar said at a press conference on Sunday.

Know more: Hundreds of thousands marooned by floods in India-held Kashmir

“Since Pakistan is a party to the Kashmir dispute, it cannot and should not remain oblivious to the plight of the Kashmiris,” he said and urged the Foreign Office to come up with a strongly-worded call for India to let the world community help the stranded people.

Mr Akbar, who is also secretary general of the ruling People’s Party in AJK, thanked Leader of Opposition in the National Assembly Syed Khursheed Shah and Senator Raza Rabbani for speaking for the flood-affected people of held Kashmir at the recently-concluded joint sitting of both houses of parliament. But he regretted that the joint session had failed to adopt a resolution on the matter.

He said the devastation wrought by flooding in India-held Kashmir warranted immediate remedial measures and warned that any delay in rescue effort could exacerbate the situation there.

He recalled that when a massive earthquake struck AJK in 2005, Islamabad had made the region open to international aid agencies and people from different areas of Pakistan had reached the quake-hit areas with relief goods.

“On the contrary, we have not witnessed such a gesture on the part of the Indian government. This is enough to prove who feels our pain,” he said.

He praised Kashmiri youth for their courage and resilience in the face of the worst disaster in the region in a century. “They way they helped out stranded people without any resources serves as a...model for others.”

He suggested that the LoC crossing points should be used for transportation of relief goods, instead of trade items, until normalcy returned to the other side.

Civil society activists and journalists from AJK should be allowed to go across the LoC to carry out and cover relief and rescue work, he said.

He thanked the Bill Gates Foundation for donating $7 million for relief activities in held Kashmir.

Published in Dawn, September 22nd , 2014