india

Updated: Jul 04, 2020 22:23 IST

Foreign Minister Jaishankar, who has led India ‘s diplomatic offensive against Islamabad after Jammu and Kashmir’s special status was scrapped, has linked Pakistan’s angry response to the huge investments that it had made to support terror and attempt to destabilise its neighbour. He also underscored that India didn’t really have a problem talking to Pakistan but certainly had a problem in restarting dialogue with “Terroristan”.

Jaishankar, who is also in the United States along with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, said Pakistan had created an entire industry of terrorism to deal with the Kashmir issue. The bigger issue, the foreign minister told a New York audience at cultural organization Asia Society, was that Pakistan 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 a legitimate instrument of statecraft. I think that’s at the heart of the issue,” the minister said, according to news agency Press Trust of India.

Jaishankar said after Parliament effectively abrogated Article 370, Pakistan now sees its “investment” of 70 years undercut if this policy succeeds.

“So theirs is today a reaction of anger, of frustration in many ways, because you have built an entire industry over a long period of time,” Jaishankar said, explaining Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan’s belligerent and non-stop attacks on India after Article 370 was scrapped.

Jaishankar also delivered a sharp takedown of the argument that puts the Kashmir issue at the heart of every problem between India and Pakistan. It is not like India and Pakistan agree on everything else and the two countries have wonderful relationships and there is a Kashmir issue, he argued.

“We had an attack on Mumbai city. The last time I checked, Mumbai city 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 minister said.

The problem is really the “mindset,” he said, adding that every time there is a change of government in Pakistan, “somebody says its new and nothing to do with the earlier guys” and blames the previous government.

Second, they say, “it has nothing to do with us as a country, it’s all the Americans. The Americans taught us the bad habits by doing the Afghan jihad. We were good people till you came along,” he said, taking a strong jibe at Pakistan.

“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,” he said, adding that at one level it’s a huge issue and another level it’s a very obvious issue.

“These are not activities which are subterranean. These are activities in broad daylight. They know where the camps are, anybody knows where the camps are, just google them. You’ll find them,” he said, according to PTI.