Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif with India’s Home Minister Rajnath Singh (R) and Pakistan’s Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan (L) at the inaugural session of 7th SAARC Home/ Interior Ministers meeting in Islamabad on Thursday.
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No bilateral meeting between the Indian home minister and his Pakistani counterpart took place.
At the summit, the Home Minister used his address to further India’s complaint of Pakistan inciting the recent unrest in Kashmir which has left at least 50 people dead in clashes that began with last month’s shooting of 22-year-old terrorist Burhan Wani by security forces. Mr. Singh then took the decision to skip the lunch.
He called upon the countries from the region to differentiate between terrorism and freedom movements, sanctified by the UN Security Council, and observed that violence against the freedom fighters in a disputed territory under Indian occupation was state-sponsored.
The Indian delegation led by Rajnath Singh left the meeting and did not talk to media at the airport as well.
He said he had suggested to the SAARC Ministers that sanctions and bans imposed against terrorists by the global community have to be honoured.
“Instead of engaging in a blame game and taking swipes at each other we should take time out to reflect and sit down together and try to work out the problems and reservations which we might have towards each other”, Nisar said. “We need to see them go after all groups and as I just said, even those groups that might not threaten Pakistan itself but threaten its neighbours”, he said. Dozens have been killed in the weeks that have followed, as India struggles to restore normalcy to Kashmir.
“I’m not going to get into the specifics of the back-and-forth except to say that we obviously believe that Pakistan needs to do all it can to confront all terrorists operating on its soil”.
India today sought strengthening of SAARC monitoring desks on terrorism and drugs, underlining that illicit funds generated from narcotics and fake currency networks are being fed into supporting terror activities. “I had not gone there for lunch”, he said amid thumping of benches by members.
Chairing the seventh Saarc ministers meeting attended by interior ministers of India, Afghanistan, Nepal, Bhutan, the Maldives, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, Nisar took the unprecedented step of delivering Pakistan’s statement.
Rajnath Singh did meet with Sharif on Thursday morning, but as part of the group of SAARC ministers.
It was the first visit by an Indian minister to Pakistan after the January attack on the Indian Air Force base at Pathankot, also blamed on Pakistani terrorists.
Leader of Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad condemned the protests by Hafiz Saeed’s organisation against Singh’s visit. The protests were held at a distance of about 10 kilometers from the National Assembly.
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But the activists from the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), the charitable arm of the anti-India Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group, did not have permission from either the Pakistani or Indian authorities to cross the contested border and were stopped in a village on the Pakistani side where they staged a protest.
