Pak Foreign Minister’s call casts dark shadow over K-dialogue

Arun Joshi

Tribune News Service

Jammu, January 31

Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi’s phone call to Kashmiri separatist leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq on Tuesday touched off a fresh exchange of salvos between India and Pakistan and dirtied the already dirty narrative on Kashmir that may hit hard all the possibilities of the India-Pakistan dialogue and also that of the Delhi-Srinagar axis.

The call was made on a purpose to stoke further anti-India flames in Kashmir to disrupt the peace restoration efforts and to meddle in the forthcoming elections in Jammu and Kashmir by using its proxies to intensify their moves against Delhi.

Where was the need to make a phone call to Mirwaiz when Pakistan has already been leading an anti-India campaign on the issue of the alleged human rights violations in Kashmir, after it had sponsored and then advertised a one-sided UNHCR report on human rights conditions in the Valley? The only answer to that is that Pakistan wants to stoke fresh violence in Kashmir and derail the whole electoral process in Kashmir.

India reacted on the expected lines – rejected Pakistan’s locus standi on Kashmir, summoned its High Commissioner to India last night, only to find that Pakistan was already prepared with its wider plot on the issue, reiterating its stand against the “occupation forces in the Indian occupied Kashmir” and responded with the summoning of the Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan.

Things will deteriorate further as the new and hostile acts between Delhi and Islamabad threaten to unfold in the coming days ahead of the elections in Jammu and Kashmir.

The Tuesday call was no ordinary call, it had the entire anti-India ring. All the doubts get cleared from the opening sentences of the Pakistan Foreign Office’s statement on the phone call.

It read “The Foreign Minister briefed him (Mirwaiz) on the efforts of the government of Pakistan to highlight the gross human rights violations being perpetrated by the Indian occupation forces in Indian occupied Jammu and Kashmir.”

And it concluded: “Mirwaiz Umar Farooq greatly appreciated the efforts of the government of Pakistan and emphasised that the Indian atrocities shall never be able to suppress the will of the people of the Indian occupied Jammu and Kashmir, who will continue to raise their voice against severe Indian repression.”

The call for shutdown by the Joint Resistance Leadership on Sunday against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit, though a traditional way of separatists to show their presence, is having a definite reference to the phone call and what happened in its aftermath.

Pakistan and some Kashmiri leaders are in the habit of seeing everything through the prism of the forthcoming parliamentary elections in the country, but forget that the kind of language and the dirty ambitions that Pakistan is pursuing would be beyond the area of tolerance by any dispensation in Delhi — NDA or UPA.

India has the right to assert its sovereignty and caution mischievous elements like Qureshi and the military-backed establishment that he represents in Pakistan of the “implications” of the kind of the twisted narrative on Jammu and Kashmir.