India has made it clear that it will not back down from raising the issue of human rights violations by the Pakistani military in Balochistan despite Pakistan reportedly saying it violates the UN Char
India has made it clear that it will not back down from raising the issue of human rights violations by the Pakistani military in Balochistan despite Pakistan reportedly saying it violates the UN Charter, even as New Delhi continued to lambaste Islamabad’s attempts to internationalise the Kashmir issue.
“If human rights are being violated and stamped upon, if speaking about that is wrong, many leaders from many countries will then have stand scrutiny. The foreign secretary had also said that humanity doesn’t stop at our borders. If we feel strongly about human rights violations happening in a particular part of the world, we have every right to raise those concerns. We will raise those concerns. We have raised those concerns in the past also. In fact, the blatant interference is cross-border terrorism which Pakistan has been raising again and again repeatedly.”
Lashing out at Pakistan PM Nawaz Sharif’s move on sending 22 Pakistani parliamentarians as envoys to highlight the Pakistani stand, the MEA ridiculed the move, saying, “Well, sending out 22 envoys is not going to make their baseless and untenable claims legitimate. I would say that instead of sending 22 envoys with a wrong message to the wrong countries, it would have been better to send just one envoy with the right message to the right countries. The message obviously has to be one of stopping support to cross-border terrorism, ending incitement to violence in J&K, and putting an end to interference in India’s internal affairs.”
On Mr Sharif writing yet again to the UN on the Kashmir issue, the MEA said, “As far as the latest letter that has been written to the UN Secretary-General is concerned, these are things we have seen before. They can write as many letters as they want to. This will not change the reality on the ground... (which) is that J&K is an integral part of India and part of the Indian state of J&K is under the forcible and illegal occupation of Pakistan. As far as the internal situation in J&K is concerned, we believe that Pakistan has no locus standi in commenting on that. We are perfectly capable of dealing with that.”
In response to a question, the MEA also said that the India-Pakistan ties were not discussed with the US during the visit of US Secretary of State John Kerry, but that Pakistani support to terrorism figured in the talks. “India-Pakistan relations were not discussed, Pakistan’s support to terrorism was discussed,” the MEA said.
On Mr Kerry’s comment that Pakistan was also a victim of terror, MEA spokesperson Vikas Swarup said India did not say it was not. “But we are asking who created that terror. That is the real issue. The thing that needs to be understood how did the victimisation start. For us the real issue is that there should not be any differentiation between good terrorist and bad terrorist and Kerry had clearly said that,” said Mr Swarup.
“As far as the China-Pakistan economic corridor is concerned, our position has been made very clear to both the parties concerned that it passes through Indian sovereign territory under Pakistan’s illegal occupation and when we say it is PoK, it is exactly that — Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. It is part of Indian territory and we would obviously have concerns about any project happening there with any third party collaboration,” he added.
On reports that All-India Radio is planning to focus on its news service in the Baloch language, the MEA said, “As you know, the information and cultural space in South Asia has a lot of commonalities. AIR already provides a number of services in foreign and Indian languages. To the best of my knowledge, they provide services in 27 foreign languages and 12 Indian languages... Fresh services can be added and existing services can be augmented... So we have to look at it purely from that perspective.”
