Prime Minister Narendra Modi addresses at a programme titled ‘Relevance of Mahatma Gandhi in the Contemporary... Read More

WASHINGTON: From invoking Mahatma Gandhi ’s life and message to recognition by Bill Gates for his work on sanitation, Prime Minister Narendra Modi navigated above and around a vituperative attack by his Pakistani counterpart Imran Khan in New York, leaving his external affairs minister S Jaishankar to tell the global community in the context of the Kashmir issue that New Delhi will only talk to Pakistan only if it turns back from being a "Terroristan."

As Modi soaked up encomiums on Tuesday from world leaders for India’s lighting up of the United Nations with a roof-top solar park, Jaishankar dismantled the dark and dystopian future of the subcontinent presented by Imran Khan at a UN press conference where he (Khan) warned of massacre, genocide, war, and nuclear conflagration if the global community did not heed Pakistan’s narrative on Kashmir.

In a sharp counter, Jaishankar told an Asia Society audience that problems with Pakistan went beyond Kashmir because it had created an entire industry of terrorism for a foundational attack on India.

“It is not like India and Pakistan agree on everything else and the two countries have wonderful relationships and there is a Kashmir issue,” Jaishankar explained. “We had an attack on Mumbai. The last time I checked, Mumbai was not a part of Kashmir. So if Pakistani terrorists can attack states and regions which are far removed from Kashmir, we have got to recognize that there is a bigger problem out there.”

The problem is India's efforts to forge a better, more equitable union. Pakistan is reacting with anger and frustration to India’s scrapping of special status to Kashmir because it has built an entire industry of terrorism over a long period of time and now sees its “investment” of 70 years undercut if this policy succeeds, India’s top foreign policy expert elucidated. Pakistan, he said, has to accept that the “model which they have built for themselves, no longer works. That you cannot, in this day and age, conduct policy using terrorism as an instrument of statecraft. I think that's at the heart of the issue.”

India has no problem talking to Pakistan, “but we have a problem talking to Terroristan. And they have to be one and not be the other,” Jaishankar said.

Earlier, at press conference on the sidelines of the UN meet, Imran Khan stepped up his attack on New Delhi, painting an apocalyptic scenario of the massacres and genocide in Kashmir, and going so far as to warn there would be a nuclear war if the global community remained indifferent to Pakistan’s reading of the situation.

Lamenting the silence of the international community on the Kashmir issue, Khan blamed the United States and previous Pakistani regimes for Pakistan's patronage of terror groups (which he does not deny) saying Pakistan was left holding the can after the west initially treated the mujaheddin as freedom fighters in Afghanistan before declaring them as terrorists.

But Indian officials ridiculed the explanation, pointing out that Pakistan’s embrace of terrorism predated both the US-Soviet face-off in Afghanistan ( Pakistani terrorists sent to wrest Kashmir in 1965 and 1948 were euphemistically called “raiders” and “irregulars”) and continued long after 1989 when Soviet troops packed up the US wound up covert ops) and and even after 9/11.

“The problem is really the mindset…there is a fundamental issue there which they need to understand and we need to encourage them to do - that is to move away from terrorism,” Jaishankar said, adding that at one level it’s a huge issue and another level it’s a very obvious one.

While Imran Khan was drawing a dark and dire future for the sub-continent because of separatist insurgency in Kashmir Valley and lamenting the world’s indifference to the scenario he projected, Modi was literally lighting up the UN, inviting half dozen world leaders to the dedication of the Mahatma Gandhi Solar Park which will illuminate the global forum.

Separately, Modi also accepted on behalf of the people of India the Goalkeepers Global Awards given to him by the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation for the Swatch Bharat Abhiyaan (national sanitation program) in the face of protests and a sustained international campaign against such recognition because of his purported human rights infractions.

The events provided a sharp contrast between India and Pakistan and their approach at the UN, with one side obsessed with the Kashmir issue at the expense of everything else and getting little traction for its narrative, and the other side rising above it after asserting that it has both the right and jurisdiction to bring about constitutional and administration changes to the territory without changing its external border.

More fireworks are expected in the coming days with both Imran Khan and Modi scheduled to address the UN General Assembly on September 27.

