PolicyDiplomacy
India tells Pakistan at UN to vacate occupied Kashmir and look after its own citizens
Answering Pakistan at a General Assembly dialogue on minority rights, Indian diplomat Raghoo Puri said Islamabad had misused the forum for propaganda, the third such clash at the UN this week.
Key points
- Indian diplomat Raghoo Puri told the UN that Pakistan must vacate the territory under its illegal occupation.
- He spoke at the General Assembly's Third Committee dialogue with the Special Rapporteur on minority issues.
- India said protecting minorities is primarily the sovereign duty of States.
India accused Pakistan of misusing a United Nations debate on minority rights for propaganda and told it to leave the parts of Jammu and Kashmir it holds, in a sharp exchange at the General Assembly in New York.
Raghoo Puri, First Secretary at India’s Permanent Mission to the UN, was replying to Pakistan at the Third Committee’s interactive dialogue with the Special Rapporteur on minority issues.
“Pakistan predictably misused the forum for propaganda. Jammu & Kashmir is an integral and inalienable part of India,” Puri said. “Pakistan must vacate the territory under its illegal occupation.”
He went further, telling Pakistan’s representatives that they would do better to concentrate on the welfare of their own citizens than on carrying out directives from their military. What Pakistan’s delegation said at the session that drew the reply has not been made public.
Minorities and the state
Puri used the rest of India’s intervention to set out how New Delhi sees the protection of minorities. That duty, he said, rests primarily with States themselves and should be guided by the principle of sovereign equality.
He pointed to the safeguards for religious and linguistic minorities written into India’s Constitution and described them as a reflection of the country’s civilisational ethos of diversity.
Third clash in a week
The exchange was the latest in a run of sharp replies by Indian diplomats in the Third Committee, which deals with social, humanitarian and human rights questions.
On Thursday, First Secretary Bhavika Mangalanandan used a dialogue on funeral rights to remind the committee that Pakistan had refused to take back the bodies of its own soldiers killed in the 1999 Kargil war, and said a state that could not protect its own minorities had no standing to lecture India. She also criticised the way the rapporteur’s report dealt with discrimination in funerals during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Earlier in the week, in a debate on enforced disappearances, an MEA official warned that human rights should not become a tool of political pressure.
In the same committee, Deputy Secretary Barkha Tamrakar spoke on a separate report about justice systems and the climate crisis, holding up India’s National Green Tribunal and its independent judiciary as pillars of environmental protection.
Across these sessions India has answered Pakistan’s references to Jammu and Kashmir in the same way: by calling the region an integral part of India and turning the debate back to how Pakistan treats its own people. No reply from Pakistan to Puri’s remarks had been reported by early Sunday.