ISLAMABAD: Defence Minister Khawaja Asif has taken a strong exception to the mention of Pakistan in a joint statement issued after a meeting between US President Joe Biden and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Speaking in the National Assembly today, he recalled that it was Narendra Modi who oversaw the killings of thousands of Muslims and rape of Muslim women in Gujarat during his tenure as the chief minister and in recognition of those atrocities, the US, at that time, had imposed a ban on issuing a visa to Narendra Modi.
The defence minister said the Indian prime minister continued to target the minorities, especially Muslims. There is an undeclared curfew in Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir and the people there are living under restrictions of all sorts in blatant violation of human rights.
He said the Indian government was perpetrating state terrorism in illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir.
Turning to the relations with the United States, Khawaja Asif said Pakistan today was paying a heavy price for serving as a frontline state in the two Afghan wars.
He said the menace of terrorism entered Pakistan because it acted as an ally of the United States in the war on terrorism. He regretted that the sacrifices of Pakistan were not acknowledged.
The minister said elections were due in the country. He said whosoever forms the next government it should pursue stable relations with the United States and the neighboring countries. He said Pakistan should leverage on its geographical location.
Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari decried that in the past 14 months, the world had moved on from Afghanistan to Ukraine and was not paying attention to terrorism.
“It is very easy to write in a statement to focus on terrorism, but if that attention is not there then the issue would not be solved,” the foreign minister said.
He added that neither the US nor Europe nor the world was focused on the issue of terrorism after the fall of Kabul.
“Their first attention is geopolitics and then other issues. We think terrorism is such an issue that major powers shouldn’t make it controversial or a victim of their geopolitics.
“If we have to correctly combat terrorism, we will do it ourselves in our country and if we have to combat it together in the rest of the world, then we can only do so when our international partners take the issue as seriously and say: ‘Our other issues and conflicts in the world aside, we will not do geopolitics on terrorism and the whole world will combat it as one.’
“Only then will we be able to uproot and eliminate it,” the foreign minister said. Bilawal pointed out that Pakistan would take action against terrorism due to the aspirations of its people and its national security needs, not because the joint statement mentioned it.
“Why will we not want to eliminate terrorism? … we want to combat terrorism,” he said, adding that the issue was raised, confronted and defeated previously as well.
Bilawal said Pakistan was pushed back and terrorism had again become an issue for the country due to the policies of the ex-prime minister.
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