WATCH: Pakistan accuses India of fomenting ‘state-backed terrorism’

Pakistan on Friday accused India of fomenting terror in the country while creating a myth that Pakistan was the perpetrator of terror.

The comments came via Pakistan’s representative in the United Nations General Assembly, where she was responding to comments from India on Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s speech at the UNGA earlier on Friday.

In the right of reply, the Pakistani delegation termed India’s reply a collection of “denial, deflection and disinformation,” which continues to define India’s diplomacy.

“The myth of terrorism against Pakistan created and propagated by India cannot and will not hide the the stark reality that the people of Pakistan occupied Jammu and Kashmir and its own minorities are victims of its state-sponsored terrorism,” Pakistan said.

Noting that over the past two decades, thousands of innocent Pakistanis have lost their lives or have been injured as a result of Indian-sponsored terrorism, Pakistan stated that India itself is the principal perpetrator, sponsor, financer and abetter of terrorism in the region.

“India has sponsored and perpetrated terrorism and aggression against all its neighbours by creating terrorist groups and destabilizing and blockading neighbors to do its strategic bidding,” the representative said.

“In Pakistan, it is funding and supporting terrorist organizations like the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the Baloch Liberation Authority (BLA).”

The representative said that Pakistan had shared irrefutable evidence of Indian involvement in sponsoring and supporting terrorism with the international community, while India’s National Security Advisor Ajit Doval has also publicly admitted to supporting and financing terrorist organizations.

“The captured Indian spy Kulbhushan Jhadav has also confessed to organizing terrorist attacks in Pakistan,” she said.

Indian oppression

The representative pointed to how the Hindutva-inspired RSS and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government unilaterally and illegally, on August 5, 2019, termed the ‘Final Solution’, saw India depute 900,000 occupation forces in occupied Jammu and Kashmir. It turned the densest occupation in history into the largest open-air prison in the world for 8 million Kashmiri men, women, and children in the world’s largest open-air prison.

In this prison, there are rampant extrajudicial killings in fake encounters, enforced disappearances of 15,000 young Kashmiri boys, incarceration of entire Kashmiri leadership, bringing about demographic change by issuing millions of fake domicile certificates to non-Kashmiris, gerrymandering of electoral boundaries to reduce Muslim representation, curbing religious freedom, media and internet blackout.

On this, the representative said that last year, Pakistan presented a comprehensive dossier containing concrete evidence of massive human rights violations, war crimes crimes against humanity and genocide being perpetrated by Indian occupation forces with impunity.

Since 1989, Indian occupation forces have committed over 100,000 extrajudicial killings, around 162,000 cases of arbitrary arrest and torture, over 25,000 pellet gun injuries, 11,250 cases of rape and gang rape and 8,652 unmarked mass graves testify to the genocide which is being committed in the occupied territory, the representative detailed.

“Yet we fear that these discoveries of Indian crimes are but the tip of the iceberg,” she said and pointed to the reports by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights highlighting the grave and systematic human rights violations and violations of international humanitarian law while calling for accountability.

“The high commissioner has recommended the establishment of a commission of inquiry to investigate these atrocities against the Kashmiri people and has called upon India to grant access to monitor the worsening human rights situation,” she said.

Professor Gregory Stanton, president of Genocide Watch, warned that “the Indian government’s action in Kashmir has been an extreme case of persecution and could have very well led to genocide”.

“Not surprisingly, Indian authorities have not yet responded to any of these communications,” the representative said.

“In fact, a witch hunt has been launched against those who dare to report these crimes, including Amnesty International and other human rights organizations, journalists and human rights defenders,” she said.

“If India has nothing to hide, it must grant access to the occupied territory to a human rights mechanism, accept a UN Commission of inquiry and agree to implement UN Security Council resolutions granting the right to self-determination to the people of Kashmir.”