India lampoons Pak at Commonwealth foreign ministers' meet for raising Kashmir issue

A day after being elected to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), Pakistan drew flak from India on Wednesday – not only for exporting terrorism to other countries, but also for carrying out a genocide in 1971 and continuing for persecuting its indigenous minorities.

New Delhi sharply responded to a move by Pakistan to use a virtual meeting of the Commonwealth Foreign Ministers to tacitly criticise India – for allegedly “targeting its religious minorities groups” as well as for illegally engineering “demographic change” in Jammu and Kashmir.

“It was unfortunate that today’s Commonwealth (Foreign Ministers’) Meeting was misused by one of our South Asian member state to pursue its own bigoted, ill-conceived, narrow and unilateral agenda on a multilateral platform,” Vikas Swarup, Secretary (West) at the Ministry of External Affairs, said, delivering the national statement of India.

Swarup took part in the meeting on behalf of External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar.

His comment came after Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Government in New Delhi of transgressing the rights and freedoms of millions.

Qureshi’s sought to use the meeting to attack New Delhi even as Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan said in Islamabad that election of his nation to the United Nations Human Rights Council was a diplomatic achievement and Pakistan would expose the alleged violation of human rights by India in Jammu and Kashmir.

“While the world remains preoccupied with (Covid-19) pandemic, a state in South Asia is targeting its religious minorities groups in order to foment division and hatred amongst community groups,” Pakistan’s Foreign Minister said, without directly referring to India. “It has transgressed rights and freedoms of millions and fanned hyper-nationalism to engineer illegal demographic change in a disputed territory and sowed racial tensions. We ignore its transgressions only at our own peril.”

Swarup responded by wondering if Pakistan’s Foreign Minister was describing his own country. “And not surprisingly it came from a globally acknowledged promoter of state-sponsored terrorism masquerading as an alleged victim of the same. We heard it from a country that brought genocide to South Asia 49 years back when it killed its own people,” he said, referring to Pakistan Army’s killing spree after losing the 1971 war, which liberated East Pakistan and gave birth to a new nation, Bangladesh. “This is also the same country that has the dubious distinction of becoming synonymous with the phrase ‘epicentre of terrorism’ and hosting the largest number of terrorists proscribed by the United Nations.”

He also underlined that the only dispute between New Delhi and Islamabad left unresolved in what Qureshi described as a "disputed territory” was Pakistan own illegal occupation of certain parts of the territory of India. He said that Pakistan would have to “sooner or later” vacate the area it occupied in Jammu and Kashmir of India. He, however, did not directly name Pakistan.