ISLAMABAD: Foreign Office said Friday that India’s “myopic attitude” is rendering a valuable platform for regional cooperation – the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) – increasingly dysfunctional and hoped that New Delhi would review its self-serving approach and enable the Saarc process to move forward for progress and prosperity of the peoples of the region.
Commenting on the Indian Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) spokesperson Arindam Bagchi’s remarks in the context of Saarc and Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK), Foreign Office spokesperson Asim Iftikhar said Pakistan categorically rejects the false claims and tendentious remarks made by his Indian counterpart and reiterated the country’s readiness to host the 19th Saarc Summit as soon as the artificial obstacles created in its way are removed.
He said India’s obstruction of the Saarc process was an established fact. Motivated by its partisan reasons, and acting in violation of Charter provisions requiring exclusion of bilateral issues.
He added that India was responsible for stymieing the 19th Saarc Summit scheduled to take place in Pakistan in 2016.
“India’s myopic attitude is rendering a valuable platform for regional cooperation increasingly dysfunctional. Pakistan hoped that India would review its self-serving approach and enable the SAARC process to move forward for the progress and prosperity of the peoples of South Asia,” he said.
India’s obstruction of SAARC process an established fact: FO
The spokesperson added that no amount of obfuscation and misrepresentation by the Indian officials could hide India’s state-terrorism in IIOJK.
“The egregious violations of human rights of the Kashmiri people had been extensively documented by the international human rights machinery, including in the two Kashmir reports issued by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in 2018 and 2019,” he stated.
In addition, he said that Pakistan had shared several dossiers with the international community on India’s unabated human rights abuses in IIOJK and its state-terrorism against the Kashmiri people and in Pakistan.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2021