Pakistan, India engage in verbal duel over Kashmir

Pakistani diplomat says breeding grounds of terrorism in region are Indian nationalist organisations

UNITED NATIONS: Rejecting Indian allegations linking Pakistan to terrorist acts, a Pakistani diplomat has said that the breeding ground of terrorism in the region are, in fact, the “RSS centres of fascism” –India’s right-wing, Hindu nationalist and paramilitary organisation.

“One would indeed marvel at the credentials of the pontiff for who would be more qualified to talk of terrorism than those who practice it as an instrument of state policy,”  Saad Ahmed Warraich, a counsellor at the Pakistan Mission to the United Nations, told the UN General Assembly on Saturday.



Warraich was exercising his right of reply to an Indian diplomat, Ennem Ghambir, who brushed aside Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi’s statement earlier in the day, saying India was linked to the massacre of children in the 2014 terrorist attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar.  “Her diatribe was a reflection not only of the deep-seated Indian hostility towards my country but was also reflective of the Indian habit of conflating fact with fabrication,” the Pakistani delegate said of his Indian counterpart.

“Pakistan shall never forget the mass murder of more than 150 children in a Peshawar School, the terrible Mastung attack and many others that have links with terrorists supported by India,” Qureshi had said.

Exercising his right to reply, the Pakistani diplomat said that in India, claims of religious superiority were perpetrated through straight patronage all across the country and claimed that “the bleeding ground of terrorism in our region are the RSS centres of fascism”.               Denouncing BJP leader and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, the Pakistani diplomat said that “unabashed Hindu extremist Yogi Adityanath, who openly advocates religious superiority of the Hindus, serves as the face of the largest Indian state Uttar Pradesh”.

Without taking BJP chief Amit Shah’s name, the diplomat said that several Bengalis in Assam have suddenly made stateless and “have been called termites by a prominent Indian leader”.    “In illiberal India of today, there is no room for dissent,” he added.

“The Indian representative could have spoken of the agony of Farooq Ahmad Dar who was tied to an army jeep and paraded in front of unarmed Kashmiri protestors and used as human shield; or Kaiser Bhatt, who was run over and killed by a military jeep,” Warraich said.



“Utter Pradesh; where right to citizenship to Bengalis in Assam is being arbitrarily rescinded, and who have suddenly been made stateless and have been called “termites” by a prominent Indian leader; where churches and mosques are torched, is surely not qualified to give sermons to others.

“India’s proclivity to violence is also no secret,” the Pakistan delegate said.
Published in The Express Tribune, October 1^st, 2018.