India’s foreign minister on Friday predicted that security restrictions across Kashmir would be eased in the “coming days,” but rejected Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan’s call for talks over the divided Himalayan region.

In an interview with POLITICO in Brussels, India’s External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said he hasn’t had time to read Friday’s New York Times op-ed by Khan, which seeks the opening of a dialogue between Islamabad and New Delhi, but argued the idea is a nonstarter while Pakistan “openly practices terrorism.”

Khan argued that it is urgent to begin discussions while a “nuclear shadow” hovers over South Asia, but the Indian minister said there is no hope of negotiations until Pakistan reins in its financing and recruitment of militant groups. “Terrorism is not something that is being conducted in dark corners of Pakistan. It’s done in broad daylight,” he complained.

Jammu and Kashmir leaped back to the top of the international agenda as a flashpoint between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan earlier this month, when New Delhi stripped the state of its autonomous status, restricted communications and imposed curfews.

Since early August, leading international media have reported widespread arrests, supply problems at hospitals, demonstrators wounded by pellet shots and small businesses struggling to get by because of communications’ blackouts in Kashmir. Khan accused the Indian security services of shooting protesters dead.

“We would not accept any country telling us who to buy weapons from and who not to buy from” — Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, India’s external affairs minister

Jaishankar said internet and telephone outages were needed to stop the activation of “terrorist assets” and to prevent “people who are doing violence to contact each other.” When asked about medicines and small businesses, he said he thinks “a lot of the reports about shortages are fictitious,” but he also conceded it isn’t possible to stop communications between militants without an impact on the rest of the economy.

“How do I cut off communications between the terrorists and their masters on the one hand, but keep the internet open for other people? I would be delighted to ... pass on this information.”

Time to pull forces out

Jaishankar is confident, however, that there would be an improvement soon.

“I would suggest to you that in the coming days you will see an easing up progressively,” he said. This should involve a reduction in the number of extra security forces [who were brought into the disputed region] and the minister insisted he wants police sent back to their original duties soon. “Frankly they have other jobs and other things to do.”

The former ambassador to Washington and Beijing also adamantly denied that there was a Hindu nationalist agenda in removing Kashmir’s special status in order to allow more non-Muslims to buy property there and muscle aside the Muslim majority.

“The kind of people who say this are people who don’t know India,” he said. “Does this sound like the culture of India?”

The dispute over Kashmir has opened up a raw religious and demographic faultline in South Asia, with Pakistan’s Khan openly accusing New Delhi of pursuing a Hindu supremacist agenda that seeks to turn India’s Muslims into second-class citizens.

Jaishankar retorted that the new investment landscape in Kashmir would only be to the region’s broader economic advantage. He said Kashmir’s new status would allow the sort of big entrepreneurial investment that is more typical in other Indian states. “People in this day and age were not willing to invest in a state with such restrictive conditions,” he said, arguing that weak economic development in Kashmir has played into the hands of “cross-border terrorists.”

The minister also flatly dismissed any suggestion that New Delhi might strip powers from any other autonomous Indian regions, saying the situation in Jammu and Kashmir had been “unique.”

During his visit to Brussels, Jaishankar met the president of the European Parliament, David Sassoli, and European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, who urged dialogue between India and Pakistan and "stressed the importance of steps to restore the rights and freedoms of the population in Kashmir," Mogherini's office said in a statement.

Treading round Trump

Turning to India’s relations with U.S. President Donald Trump, Jaishankar broached the challenges posed by a potential tit-for-tat tariff war, India’s interest in resuming purchases of Iranian oil and U.S. reservations about India’s acquisition of S-400 surface-to-air missiles.

Discussing Trump’s increasingly hard stance on Indian tariffs, the minister said India is in a mood to compromise. “Like any relationship, there’s give and take … Our expectation is that our trade ministers will sit down in the near future. I think many of these issues are eminently [open] to resolution.”

By contrast, he admitted that energy-hungry India’s desire to purchase Iranian oil is “rather complicated” and that he hopes for “greater clarity.” When asked whether there are really no grounds to negotiate because Washington simply has zero tolerance for Iranian oil purchases, he chose not to commit himself. “One of the nice things about an interview is that when you reach a level where you don’t want to say what you don’t want to, you don’t say it.”

On arms' purchases from Russia, however, Jaishankar took a more absolute position and argued that he is not going to be deterred from a “solid, time-tested” relationship with Moscow.

“We would not accept any country telling us who to buy weapons from and who not to buy from,” he said.