India does not have high expectation from Pakistan, says Jaishankar on Zardari's remark

India does not have very high expectations from Pakistan, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said on Monday, reacting to the neighbouring country’s Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari’s recent diatribe against Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

“Our expectation levels with the Pakistanis are never very high,” Jaishankar said at an event in New Delhi.

After Zardari had called Modi “the butcher of Gujarat’ during a news conference at the United Nations headquarters in New York last week, India had condemned the statement calling it “uncivilized” and “a new low even for Pakistan”. New Delhi had also reminded Islamabad that the Pakistani Foreign Minister had chosen to make the comment against the Prime Minister of India on the anniversary of the crushing defeat his country’s armed forces had experienced in the 1971 war, which had led to the creation of Bangladesh.

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“I think my ministry has said very clearly what we think about what he (foreign minister of Pakistan) said. We said what we had to say,” Jaishankar said in New Delhi.

“Osama bin Laden is dead, [but] the Butcher of Gujarat lives and he is the prime minister of India,” Zardari had said, responding to a statement Jaishankar had made at the UN headquarters itself on the same day. “He (Narendra Modi) was banned from entering this country (the United States). These are the prime minister and foreign minister of (the) RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), which draws inspiration from Hitler’s SS.”

Zardari had apparently been referring to the 2002 communal clashes in Gujarat when Modi had been the chief minister of the western state of India. He had also reiterated the allegation earlier made by Pakistan about India’s role in orchestrating terror attacks in that country, particularly the one in front of the residence of the Lashkar-e-Tayyiba founder Hafiz Saeed’s residence in Lahore last year.

Jaishankar had earlier called Pakistan an epicentre of terrorism and not-so-subtly reminded that it was at Abbottabad in Pakistan that the Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden had been hiding for years till being killed by the US commandos.