Pakistan optimistic about ‘positive’ Indian response

Ambassador Masood claims US has offered support for dialogue

WASHINGTON:

Pakistan remains optimistic that India will reciprocate positively to Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif's sincere gesture for dialogue, with the goal of addressing various pressing matters, including the situation in Jammu and Kashmir.

Ambassador Masood Khan has also urged the United States to pay more attention to the tense region.

“We have always pursued diplomacy with India,” the Pakistani envoy was quoted as saying in a Newsweek article covering the latest regional developments.

“The prime minister has once again made an offer for engagement; the US has also expressed its support for direct dialogue between Pakistan and India on issues of concern,” he said.

“We hope there would be a reciprocal resonance from New Delhi,” Masood Khan added.

Ambassador Masood Khan has cautioned that India’s illegal annexation of occupied Kashmir on August 5, 2019, and its subsequent actions like changing the demography of the disputed region posed a grave risk to the region’s security.

“The situation has been deteriorating. It was not just annexation,” the Pakistani envoy said.

“There was this new domicile law which opened the floodgates for inflow of outsiders into the Indian Occupied Jammu & Kashmir and they are allowing their armed forces to acquire land inside Jammu and Kashmir. In addition to that, they are also doing this electoral reengineering of the constituencies to reduce Muslim majority into a minority.”

Discussing the regional situation, Ambassador Masood Khan said that the economic future of the neighborhood depended on stabilization in Afghanistan.

“We have a shared objective, to eliminate terrorism and work for infrastructure development so that we leverage our economic geography. This economic geography can be used for more connectivity, for economic partnerships and I think that terrorism in all forms is a barrier in achieving that objective,” he said.