ISLAMABAD, Sept 26: Pakistan has said that lasting peace and security cannot be established in the South Asian region until India ends state terrorism in occupied Kashmir.

“The issue is the Indian state terrorism in occupied Kashmir. Until India ends this terrorism, lasting peace and security cannot be established in region,” Foreign Office spokesman Masood Khan told BBC Radio.

“Indian leadership is scared that any peaceful solution to the Kashmir issue will perhaps go against them and they want to foil any effort aimed at resolving this issue,” the spokesman said.

He said India had inflicted a big blow to peace efforts by rejecting President Pervez Musharraf’s talks offer.

In reply to a question he said it was only India, who recognized so-called elections in occupied Kashmir. Neither the people of Kashmir and Pakistan nor any neutral body accepted it.

To another question, he said no cross-border movement had been taking place at all and India also knew about this fact.

When asked why the atmosphere between India and Pakistan that was moving towards improvement was once again beginning to be tense the spokesman said: “It is very essential to understand the complete background.”

Explaining, he said, last year India created a particular tense atmosphere in the region. As a result, the situation worsened to a great extent. In April this year, Indian Prime Minister said that India was prepared for talks with Pakistan and that he was prepared to make efforts to normalize relations between the two countries.

Pakistan welcomed this statement and no doubt some headway was made, he said, adding the high commissioners of both the countries were exchanged.

Then the bus service was also started. Talks also began on some other issues such as resumption of airlinks.

“These were some good steps and some progress was made in this regard,” he said.

But the most important issue, he said, was the resumption of talks on which Indians had had been adopting dilly-dallying tactics and the situation was not improving in any way.

Responding to another question he said Pakistan had never used undiplomatic language rather the Indians had done so.

“We have displayed the utmost restraint and patience,” he said.—APP