India talks tough as Pak raises Kashmir pitch

Pakistan’s attempt to fish in Kashmir’s troubled waters has prompted India to return to its old stand that “talks and terror cannot go hand-in-hand”.

New Delhi on Thursday turned the table on Islamabad, which has of late been trying to raise its pitch on Kashmir in the wake of violent protests in the Valley against the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani by security forces of India.

The Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi accused Pakistan of coveting the territory of other nations, using terrorism as instruments of state policy and providing sanctuary to terrorists designated by the United Nations. India also delivered a strong message at the UN headquarters in New York, accusing Pakistan of extolling “virtues of terrorism”.

“The world today has a clear view of which country in our region covets the territory of others, uses terrorism as a matter of state policy, provides sanctuary to UN-designated terrorists and terrorist groups and violates human rights,” Vikas Swarup, official spokesperson of the MEA, told journalists in New Delhi.

Asked about prospects of restarting the stalled bilateral dialogue, Swarup said India had never shied away from dialogue with Pakistan, but it was incumbent on the neighbouring country “to create the right atmosphere for a productive dialogue to take place”.

He reaffirmed India’s old stand that talks with Pakistan and anti-India terror from Pakistan could not go together. New Delhi had refrained from articulating the phrase for the past several months and did not use it even after the January 2-5 terror attack on the Indian Air Force base at Pathankot in Punjab.

India talked tough after Pakistan, over the past few days, tried to internationalise the issue of Kashmir. Pakistan Prime Minister M Nawaz Sharif expressed “deep shock” over killing of Wani and subsequent death of civilians in Kashmir due to police crackdown on protesters. He is also set to chair a special meeting of his cabinet in Lahore on Friday to discuss the situation in Kashmir.

“Our internal affairs are solely ours to handle. Any effort by any other party, claiming it as theirs or trying to interfere and seeking to internationalise the issue will not change it,” said Swarup.

He was reacting to the briefings organised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Pakistan government in Islamabad over the past few days, when foreign diplomats, including envoys of US, UK, Russia, China and France (the five permanent members of UN Security Council), were briefed about the situation in Kashmir.

“Terrorism is terrorism. No amount of parsing and justification on the part of Pakistan is going to change it,” he added.

New Delhi’s envoy to Islamabad, Gautam Bambawale, was summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Pakistan government last Monday. He met A A Chaudhry, Foreign Secretary of Pakistan, who gave him a demarche, conveying Islamabad’s concern over killing of “Kashmiri leader Burhan Wani and many other civilians in Indian-occupied Kashmir by Indian military and paramilitary forces”.

Swarup on Thursday said India had rejected the demarche served by Pakistan. “Our High Commissioner had responded that the matter is a domestic issue, internal to India and that Pakistan has no locus standi in the matter,” he said.