India rejects Pak. references at U.N.

Maleeha Lodhi

• PTI-October 9, 2016

India has strongly rejected Pakistan’s references on Kashmir at the U.N., saying such remarks are a self-serving attempt by Islamabad to bring extraneous issues to the world body for its “territorial aggrandisement.”

India, exercising the Right of Reply after Pakistan’s envoy to the U.N. Maleeha Lodhi raised the Kashmir issue at the U.N, said on Friday that Pakistan had made references to the Indian State of Jammu and Kashmir in a self-serving attempt to bring extraneous issues before the committee.

Such efforts were a flagrant misuse of the body for Pakistan’s own territorial aggrandisement, India said, recalling that the Special Committee on Decolonisation was concerned only with Non-Self-Governing Territories.

It asserted that Jammu and Kashmir was an integral part of India.

Pakistan responded by saying that the United Nations recognised that all people under alien subjugation had a right to self-determination.

Exercising its Right of Reply, Pakistan said India continued to perpetrate misinformation on the Kashmir issue year after year. Raking up the Kashmir issue again at the U.N., Pakistan had said the non-implementation of the U.N. Security Council resolutions for a plebiscite in Kashmir was the “most persistent” failure of the U.N.

“The decolonisation agenda of the U.N. will remain incomplete without resolution of the Jammu and Kashmir dispute, among the oldest items on the U.N.’s agenda,” Lodhi had said the day before at a debate of the Special Political and Decolonisation Committee in the General Assembly.

She asserted that Jammu and Kashmir “never was and can never be” an integral part of India but is a disputed territory, the final status of which has yet to be determined in accordance with several resolutions of the UN Security Council.

Ms. Lodhi said the U.N. has a moral responsibility towards people suffering under colonial domination and foreign occupation.

“There is an urgent need to bring the work on this unfinished agenda to closure and eliminate the last remaining vestiges of colonialism. We hope that we will be able to achieve this shared goal sooner rather than later,” she said.