India on Saturday refuted Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi’s allegations that New Delhi sponsored terror activities in Pakistan as “preposterous”. Eenam Gambhir, India’s First Secretary in Permanent Mission to the UN, made the remark while exercising India’s right to reply at the ongoing United Nations General Assembly session in New York.
She said Qureshi’s description of a “new Pakistan” was “cast in the mould of the old”. She also dismissed his claims that New Delhi facilitated the 2014 terror attack on a Peshawar school as a “despicable insinuation that dishonours” the victims.
“Let me recollect for the new government of Pakistan the outpouring of sorrow and pain in India that followed the massacre of innocent children in 2014,” Gambhir said. “Both Houses of India’s Parliament had expressed solidarity while paying respect to the memory of those killed. Schools all over India had observed two minutes of silence in their memory.”
New Delhi accused Islamabad of attempting to “look away from the monster of terror that Pakistan has created to destabilise its neighbours”.
In his statement earlier on Saturday, Qureshi claimed that India had chosen “politics over peace” when it called off bilateral dialogue “on flimsy grounds”. “Pakistan continues to face terrorism that is financed, facilitated and orchestrated by our eastern neighbour,” Qureshi had said.
Pakistan’s Foreign Minister also claimed that the unresolved Kashmir dispute was “impacting achieving durable peace”.
India’s Minister of External Affairs Sushma Swaraj, in her statement, refuted Qureshi’s claims on bilateral negotiations and repeated India’s stance that “there can be no dialogue in such an environment”. She accused Pakistan of “glorifying killers”.
On September 20, India had agreed for a meeting between Swaraj and Qureshi on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, but called it off the next day, citing “deeply disturbing developments”. Pakistan had expressed disappointment at India’s decision.
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