Pakistan wants to live in peace with India: Qureshi

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan on Thursday once again reached out to India, saying that it wanted to live in peace with it, as South Asia has suffered and it was certainly time to move on to sustainable relations.

In this regard, Islamabad says that it expected the administration of US President Joe Biden to stop ignoring the ground realities in Indian Occupied Kashmir (IOK), based on his consistent stance on human rights. Pakistan also expected the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and the EU to play their role on the issue.

"We want to live in peace with India and we want good neighbourly relations with India but South Asia has suffered because of the Kashmir dispute. The time has come to reflect, how we move on. What is going on is unsustainable,” Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood said while addressing a photography and culture exhibition in Islamabad, attended by foreign diplomats and dignitaries, to express solidarity with the people of Indian-Occupied Kashmir (IOK).

Qureshi made it clear that while choosing not to talk about the Kashmir issue and ignoring it would not change the reality and the situation on the ground rather Pakistan always wanted that the Kashmir dispute should be resolved through dialogue and peaceful means.

“Who will create that enabling environment that is required to reengage?” He asked, requesting the foreign diplomats to inform their capitals about what was really going on in IOK.

Turning to one of the most serious health issues that have swept the world, Qureshi said it was because of these tensions in bilateral relations that there was lack of cooperation on dealing with the Covid-19. “We could have cooperated in the region to combat Covid-19 but we didn’t collectively. Regionally, we could’ve done a better job. What’s the bottleneck? We have to understand that and we need the international community to understand what the present regime in India has done in IOK is unsustainable,” the foreign minister said.

Meanwhile, the Foreign Office spokesperson expressed his disappointment to note the reference to Jammu and Kashmir in the US Department of State’s tweet regarding the resumption of 4G mobile internet in Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK). “The reference is inconsistent with the disputed status of Jammu and Kashmir as recognized by numerous United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions and the international community”, he said in a statement.

Earlier, the United States State Department on Wednesday had said that there had been no change in America’s Kashmir policy and Washington still considered both Jammu and Kashmir as a territory disputed between India and Pakistan. “We look forward to continuing political and economic progress to restore normalcy in J&K,” the State Department had commented.

“Jammu and Kashmir is one of the oldest items on the agenda of the UNSC, which remains unresolved because of India’s intransigence and unwillingness to implement the relevant UNSC resolutions and its own solemn commitments made to Pakistan, the Kashmiris and the international community”, said the spokesman.

The political and economic progress of the people of Jammu and Kashmir is inextricably linked to the realization of their desire for exercising the right to self-determination. “The international community, including the United States, must urge India to stop its consistent and systematic human rights violations in IIOJK including arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances, incarceration of political leaders, ongoing efforts to change the demographic structure of the occupied territory, extra-judicial killings of Kashmiris in fake encounters, and staged cordon-and-search operations and take genuine steps to resolve the dispute in a peaceful manner in accordance with the relevant UNSC resolutions,” was a reminder from the Foreign Office.