UNITED NATIONS: Pakistan informed the international community on Sunday that Indian Minister for External Affairs Sushma Swaraj betrayed her government’s deep hostility towards its neighbour when she attacked Islamabad in her address to the UN General Assembly.

Exercising the right of reply to Ms Swaraj’s speech, Pakistan’s Permanent Representative Ambassador Maleeha Lodhi said that the Indian minister had “indulged in an orgy of slander against Pakistan” in her address.

Ms Lodhi said that the way India promoted state-sponsored terrorism, it “establishes that India is the ‘mother of terrorism’ in South Asia”.

In her address to the UNGA on Sat­urday, Ms Swaraj had alleged that Pak­istan was an export factory for terror.

“Her comments towards my country betray the hostility that the Indian leadership has towards Pakistan — hostility we have endured for 70 years,” Ms Lodhi told the 72nd UNGA session on Saturday night (Sunday in Pakistan).

India is the mother of terrorism in South Asia, says Lodhi

“The Indian FM has sought to denigrate Pakistan’s founding father. All I can say about India’s current political luminaries is that they belong to a political organisation that has the blood of thousands of Muslims of Gujarat on its hands,” the Pakistani envoy said. “Today, this so-called largest democracy is the world’s largest hypocrisy.”

Ambassador Lodhi noted that in her speech Ms Swaraj had deliberately ignored the core issue of Jammu and Kashmir.

Disputed territory

Ambassador Lodhi noted that Jammu and Kashmir was not a part of India and was recognised by the United Nations and the international community as ‘disputed territory’. “I invite all of you, and the Indian FM, to look at the UN maps,” she said.

The Pakistani diplomat said that India’s military occupation of Kashmir was illegal as the UN Security Council had, in over a dozen resolutions, decided that the dispute must be resolved by enabling the people of Jammu and Kashmir to determine their own destiny through a UN supervised plebiscite.

She reminded the world body that India had accepted these UN resolutions but had always avoided implementing them through “obfuscation, diversion, deceit and aggression”.

Ms Lodhi recalled that India’s brutal occupation of Kashmir had killed over 100,000 innocent Kashmiris. Although India had launched a campaign of brutality inside Kashmir — including the shooting and blinding of innocent Kashmiri children with pellet guns — it had failed to subdue Kashmiri children, women and youth who came out on the streets almost daily to demand that India get out of their valley.

“India cannot hide behind semantics. Any inter-state dispute, like Kashmir, is by definition an ‘international’ dispute. If the parties fail to resolve a dispute, the UN and the international community has not only the right but the obligation to intervene and help to resolve the dispute,” she said.

“In the case of Jammu and Kashmir, that obligation is explicit; since the UN Security Council has been involved with the dispute since its very inception; and because the Council has prescribed very specifically and precisely how the dispute should be resolved,” Ms Lodhi added.

Ms Lodhi rejected the Indian minister’s claim that the UN resolutions on Kashmir were now outdated. “UN Security Council resolutions do not lapse with time. Or are ‘overtaken’, as the Indian foreign minister put it. Law has no expiry date. Morality has no sell-by date.”

Rejecting India’s allegation that Pakistan was sponsoring terrorism in South Asia, Ms Lohdi said India’s posture was that of the predator and it could not escape its legal and moral obligation to abide by the resolutions of the Security Council.

“Any other interpretation will open the door to the logic of force in international relations,” she added.

Bilateral talks

Ms Lodhi also disagreed with Ms Swaraj’s suggestion that Pakistan was avoiding bilateral talks with India. “India now also refuses a bilateral dialogue with Pakistan, either composite or comprehensive. The conditions it poses — that first there be an end of violence — begs the question. Violence emanates, first and foremost, from India’s occupation and brutal suppression of the Kashmiri people,” she said.

Ms Lodhi said that it’s under these circumstances that the Pakistan’s prime minister proposed in his speech to the UNGA that the UN secretary general should appoint a special envoy — as several of his predecessors did — to promote the implementation of the relevant provisions of the Security Council resolutions.

The prime minister also urged the UN to take steps to investigate India’s ongoing and massive violations of human rights in Kashmir, end the impunity enjoyed by India’s security forces, lift the draconian emergency laws and punish those responsible for the war crimes and genocide in Kashmir.

“If the international community wishes to avoid a dangerous escalation between India and Pakistan, it must call on India to halt its provocations and aggressive actions. It must end the ceasefire violations along the LoC. It must halt its sponsorship of terrorist groups against Pakistan,” Ambassador Lodhi said.

Definition of terrorism

Responding to Ms Swaraj’s suggestion that the UN should define terrorism, the Pakistani envoy said the UN should actually define terrorism.

“In that definition, we should include “state terrorism”. The state terrorism which the Indian National Security Adviser has boasted is being sponsored by India’s spy agencies in Pakistan’s Balochistan province in what he called a ‘double squeeze’ strategy,” she said.

Ms Lodhi told the world body that Pakistan had in its custody an Indian spy, an intelligence officer, Commander Kulbhushan Jadhav, who confessed to India’s support to terrorist activities in Pakistan.

“In fact, India has considerable experience in state sponsorship of terrorism in our region,” she said. “It has sponsored and perpetrated terrorism and aggression against all its neighbours; creating terrorist groups; destabilising and blockading neighbours to do its strategic bidding and sponsoring subversion, sabotage and terrorism in various parts of Pakistan.”

Ms Lodhi said that India’s proclivity to violence was no secret. In the 70 years since its independence India has been engaged in at least over a dozen instances of the use of force and continues to face 17 insurgencies in its own land and it has fought a war with or in each of its neighbours.

“Pakistan remains open to resuming a comprehensive dialogue with India to address all outstanding issues, especially Jammu and Kashmir and discuss measures to maintain peace and security. But this dialogue must be accompanied by an end to India’s campaign of subversion and state sponsored terrorism in Pakistan,” she concluded.

Published in Dawn, September 25th, 2017