ISLAMABAD: Rejecting the Indian statement that Pakistan “lacked the credentials” to critique India for electing the “butcher of Gujarat” as its prime minister, the Foreign Office said the people who masterminded the 2002 riots that killed more than 2,000 people, majority of them Muslims, escaped justice and now hold key positions in the far-right government of Narendra Modi.
“With its statement, the Indian government has tried to hide behind subterfuge and canard to conceal the realities of the 2002 Gujarat massacre. It is a shameful story of mass killings, lynching, rape and plunder,” the Foreign Office statement noted.
“The fact of the matter is that the masterminds of the Gujarat massacre have escaped justice and now hold key government positions in India,” the Foreign Office Spokesperson said in a press release.”
The latest round of verbal clashes between the nuclear-armed rivals in the United Nations began on Thursday after the Security Council adopted a statement warning of increasing dangers of terrorism, leading to their diplomats heatedly trading accusations and blaming each other for such attacks.
India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, never named Pakistan in his speech to the Security Council. But answering questions afterward from reporters he recalled Hillary Clinton, former US secretary of state, saying during a visit to Pakistan a decade ago “that if you keep snakes in your backyard, you can’t expect them to bite only your neighbours, eventually, they will bite the people who keep them in the backyard.”
“Pakistan is not good at taking good advice,” Jaishankar said. “The world today sees them as the epicentre of terrorism.”
Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, when asked to respond to Jaishankar’s claim at a news conference soon after, said that Pakistan as a nation has been the victim of terrorism, and that he as an individual is a victim of terrorism — his mother, Benazir Bhutto, the first woman elected to lead an Islamic country in 1988, was assassinated by a suicide bomber as she campaigned for president in 2007.
Zardari said fighting against terrorism has been a cause “that is incredibly personal to me.”
He said Jaishankar should remember “that Osama bin Laden is dead, but the butcher of Gujarat lives and he is the prime minister of India.”
Pakistan’s foreign minister’s unexpected reaction to the Indian External Affairs minister’s remarks
“I want to tell India that Osama bin Laden has been killed while the butcher of Gujarat is still alive & he is the PM of India”Says Foreign Minister of Pakistan @BBhuttoZardari pic.twitter.com/HBmhCNN9yO
— Ghulam Abbas Shah (@ghulamabbasshah) December 15, 2022
Responding to questions from the press, the spokesperson of the Foreign Office, Mumtaz Zahra Baloch, said no verbosity could hide the crimes of the “saffron terrorists”, a reference to colour which has over the years come to be identified with Hindu militants, in India.
Hindutva, the political ideology of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) party, had given rise to a climate of hate, divisiveness and impunity, Baloch noted.
An uproar in India after Pakistan’s young Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari called the Indian Prime Minister the butcher of Gujarat
BJP protest against #BilawalBhutto in Delhi pic.twitter.com/mEKjGZPcJS
— Ghulam Abbas Shah (@ghulamabbasshah) December 16, 2022
“The culture of impunity was now deeply embedded in Hindutva-driven polity in India. The acquittal of the mastermind and perpetrators of the heinous attack on the Samjhota Express that killed 40 Pakistanis on Indian soil, demonstrated the massacre of justice under the RSS-BJP dispensation.
“Intimidation and demonisation of religious minorities receive official patronage in states across India. Hindutva supremacists have been unleashed to exercise cow vigilantism, ransack places of worship, and attack religious congregations,” she added.
Baloch said India, which peddled a fictitious narrative of victimhood, was itself a perpetrator of repression in occupied Jammu and Kashmir, and a sponsor and financier of militants groups active across South Asia.
Only this week, a dossier was released containing irrefutable evidence that substantiated India’s involvement in the 2021 terrorist attack in the Johar Town neighbourhood of Lahore, she said.
“The evidence gathered with international support confirms that the Lahore attack was instigated, planned and financed by the Indian state,” the press statement quoted the spokesperson as saying.
The statement of the Indian foreign ministry criticising Zardari was also a reflection of New Delhi’s growing frustration over its failure in maligning and isolating Pakistan. After being unable to prevent Pakistan’s exit from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) grey list and international recognition of Islamabad’s counter-terrorism efforts, India was desperately using international platforms to advance its agenda to defame and target Pakistan, Baloch said.
“For a country with a grandiose vision about itself and its place in the world, India is following a policy of pettiness towards its neighbours. We are confident that the international community would look through this facade and the dream of RSS-BJP to turn South Asia in its image will remain unrealised.”
