Kashmir was never part of India: Pakistan tells UN

NEW YORK: Pakistan hit back at India at the UN after New Delhi’s representative claimed Jammu and Kashmir as India’s “integral part” with the Pakistani delegate asserting that the state is an internationally recognised disputed territory.

“In Jammu and Kashmir, India has no other claim than that of a military occupier,” Pakistan’s delegate Zulqarnain Chheena told the General Assembly. “India is compelled to use force to impose its occupation on an unwilling and oppressed people,” he added.

The Pakistani delegate was reacting to the Indian representative, Mijito Vinito, who while exercising his right of reply to Prime Minister Imran Khan’s speech, said that the Pakistani leader interfered in the internal affairs of India by raising the Kashmir dispute at the UN.

In his statement to the 193-member Assembly, Imran Khan shed a spotlight on Prime Minister Naredra Modi’s India, which he said is defined by its oppressive and brutal Indian occupation of Jammu and Kashmir and the egregious human rights violations of the Kashmiri people

Elaborating on the situation in Indian-occupied Kashmir, the Pakistani delegate said that the disputed state is not a part of India — it never was and it never will be.

“The state of Jammu and Kashmir is an internationally recognized disputed territory. As decreed by the Security Council, the final disposition of the state ‘will be made in accordance with the will of the people expressed through the democratic method of a free and impartial plebiscite conducted under the auspices of the United Nations’.”

The Kashmiri freedom struggle, he said, seeks to realize the implementation of the resolutions of the Security Council in exercise of their inalienable right to self-determination.

“The Kashmiris have a legitimate right to resist Indian occupation by all means at their disposal. This just struggle cannot be denigrated or described as terrorism. It is the occupying state which is guilty of terrorism against the occupied people.”

Like all oppressors, Chheena said, India continues to believe that it can subdue the legitimate Kashmiri resistance through brute force, bit its strategy of occupation and oppression.

“Kashmir will be free one day,” he said, adding that the Kashmiris were not alone in their just struggle as the people of Pakistan, and those in the Islamic world and elsewhere were with them.