NEW YORK: India, exercising its Right of Reply to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s United Nations General Assembly (UN) address, levelled serious allegations against Pakistan in its rebuttal, terming it a ‘terrorist state’, which Pakistan in a reply to India strongly rejected.
Nawaz Sharif had in his speech maintained that Pakistan wants peace with India but it is “not possible without resolving the Kashmir issue”. The premier urged the UN to demilitarise Jammu and Kashmir and called for steps to implement UN Security Council resolutions on Kashmir.
India’s First Secretary in the Permanent Mission of India to the UN Eenam Gambhir accused Pakistan of sponsoring terrorism, according to a Hindustan Times report.
India sees Pakistan as “a terrorist state”, she said, accusing Pakistan of diverting international aid towards training, financing and supporting terror groups as ‘militant proxies’ against neighbouring countries.
“The worst violation of human rights is terrorism,” she said. “When practised as an instrument of state policy, it is a war crime. What my country and our other neighbours are facing today is Pakistan’s long-standing policy of sponsoring terrorism, the consequences of which have spread well beyond our region,” she alleged.
Muhammad Faisal, a director general at the Foreign Office, rejected Gambhir’s accusations that Pakistan was promoting terrorism in India-held Kashmir (IHK) and elsewhere, saying that the Kashmiri uprising after the death of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani “was spontaneous and indigenous”.
