India on Wednesday slammed Pakistan for its ‘rant’ at the 20th Commonwealth Foreign Affairs Ministers Meeting. Addressing the meeting virtually on behalf of External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, MEA Secretary (West) Vikas Swarup said that it was unfortunate that the South Asian country chose the Commonwealth platform to “pursue its own bigoted, ill-conceived, narrow and unilateral agenda”.
Earlier in the day, Pakistan’s foreign minister SM Qureshi had said that “a state in South Asia is targeting its religious minority groups in order to foment division and hatred amongst community groups”.
Without taking India’s name, Pakistan FM said that the South Asian nation “has transgressed rights and freedoms of millions and fanned hyper-nationalism to engineer illegal demographic change in a disputed territory and sowed racial tensions. We ignore its transgressions only at our own peril.”
In response to Pakistan’s statement, MEA Secretary (West) Vikas Swarup said, “When we heard them rant about a South Asian state, we were left wondering why it was describing itself? And not surprisingly it came from a globally acknowledged promoter of state-sponsored terrorism masquerading as an alleged victim of the same. We heard it from a country that brought genocide to South Asia 49 years back when it killed its own people.”
Vikas Swarup, Secretary ( West) represented India at the #Commonwealth Foreign Affairs Ministers Meeting today.
Discussed progress since #CHOGM2018 and looking ahead to #CHOGM2021 in #Rwanda.Full statement here:https://t.co/q88g18Fnpz pic.twitter.com/LbZceKfO92
— Anurag Srivastava (@MEAIndia) October 14, 2020
“This is also the same country that has the dubious distinction of becoming synonymous with the phrase “epicenter of terrorism” and hosting the largest number of terrorists proscribed by the United Nations,” Vikas Swarup said.
Replying to Pakistan’s ‘disputed territory’ claim, the MEA official said, “The only dispute left in what it alleged today as a “disputed territory” is its own illegal occupation of certain parts, which sooner or later, it would have to vacate.”
“For such a country to hypocritically preach about religious minority groups elsewhere, while trampling itself upon the rights of its own indigenous minorities, was indeed most regrettable, and blatant misuse of this august platform,” Vikas Swarup said.