Indian leaders and former diplomats on Wednesday called Pakistan’s decision to downgrade diplomatic relations with India a “short-sighted” move. In the evening, Islamabad cancelled bilateral trade and expelled the Indian envoy from the country in retaliation against the Narendra Modi government’s decision to revoke Jammu and Kashmir’s special status.
“In these times it is important to maintain bilateral ties and the decision [of Pakistan] is very short sighted and it is not going to make any difference to India,” PTI quoted Congress leader and former External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid as saying. “They are the only ones who will suffer losses. But if they want to take a symbolic decision, it is their choice.”
Bharatiya Janata Party leader Ram Madhav said Pakistan had no standing on the matter. “Indian Parliament had taken a decision about Article 370 in J&K, and that is an internal matter,” he added. “No other nation has locus standi to react on this.”
Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh expressed concern about Pakistan’s decision and hoped the move would not disrupt the construction of the Kartarpur Corridor, ANI reported. “Kashmir was an internal matter for India, which was in its rights to take any decision with regard to the region, and Islamabad should not have used it as an excuse to undermine its diplomatic relations with India,” the Congress leader added.
Former Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan TCA Raghavan said the Pakistan leadership’s steps were meant to “show their political constituencies that they are dealing with the matter”. However, he added that not having diplomatic contacts was not a good development. Raghavan pointed out that trade between the two countries “unfortunately has never been of a large volume”.
Former diplomat Arun Singh, who was in charge of the Pakistan desk, said the Imran Khan government was under pressure to be seen as doing something after India’s actions “punctured the myth of major gains related to the Kashmir issue after the Trump meeting”, The Times of India reported. “They will want to test if precipitating a sense of tension and crisis will enhance international activism, which they will want to project domestically as a success of their efforts,” he added.
Former High Commissioner to Pakistan Gautam Bambawale said Pakistan had over-reacted. “The measures and steps we have taken are our internal, domestic matter,” he added. “Pakistan has no locus standi in it. Of course, they are welcome to downgrade relations. By asking our HC [High Commissioner] to return to India they are removing an important channel of communication.”
The last time one of the two countries expelled the other’s envoy was in 2002 after terror attacks in India. In early 2002, India recalled its envoy Vijay Nambiar from Pakistan in response to the attack on Indian Parliament in December 2001. India asked Pakistan high commissioner Ashraf Jehangir Qazi to leave the country in May 2002 after an attack on a military camp at Kaluchak in Jammu.
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