Islamabad has now become synonymous with terrorism and should not play victim, India said in its reply to Pakistan’s rhetoric at the United Nations. “The world does not need lessons on democracy and human rights from a country that can be charitably described as a failed state,” it said.
India’s First Secretary to the UN Eenam Gambhir said: “It is extraordinary that the state that protected Osama Bin Laden and sheltered Mullah Omar should have the gumption to play victim. The quest for a land of pure has actually produced ‘the land of pure terror’. Pakistan is now ‘Terroristan’, with a flourishing industry producing and exporting global terrorism.”
India exercised its “right to reply” after Pakistan Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi accused New Delhi of committing “war crimes” in Jammu and Kashmir and claimed that the struggle of people in the Valley is being “brutally suppressed by India’s occupation forces”.
India said that Pakistan’s counter-terrorism policy was to “mainstream and upstream terrorists by either providing safe havens to terror leaders in its military town or protecting them with political careers”. It also pointed out that Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, a leader of the UN-designated terrorist organisation Lashkar-e-Taiba, is now sought to be legitimised as a leader of a political party.
“Pakistan must understand that the state of Jammu and Kashmir is and will always remain an integral part of India,” India said, adding that irrespective of how much Islamabad scales up its cross-border terrorism, it will never succeed in undermining India’s territorial integrity.
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