UNGA75: India exercises its Right to Reply for third time in response to Pakistan

By Reena Bhardwaj
New York [US], September 26 : Hours after Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan raised the Kashmir issue in the 75th United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on Friday, India promptly responded to Khan's comments and requested the United Nations for the floor to exercise Right to Reply in response to Pakistan's statements.
Indian delegate Mijito Vinito, who had earlier walked out of the hall when Imran Khan's pre-recorded statement was played, presented India's stand.
In a strongly-worded reply, India said, "The Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir is an integral and inalienable part of India. The rules and legislation brought in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir are strictly internal affairs of India."
Earlier, Imran Khan had stated, "Pakistan has always called for a peaceful solution. To this end, India must rescind the measures it has instituted since August 5 in 2019, end its military siege and other gross human rights violations in Jammu and Kashmir."
Responding to Khan, India firmly said, "The only dispute left in Kashmir relates to the part of Kashmir that is still under illegal occupation of Pakistan. We call upon Pakistan to vacate all those areas that it is in illegal occupation of."
Khan's virtual address had raised the same issues on Kashmir, as he has done in recent speeches to multilateral bodies, and criticised the Indian government on several issues.
After Khan's speech, TS Tirumurti, India's permanent representative to the UN, tweeted that the country would use the "Right to Reply" facility to respond to the Pakistani premier's address.
"This Hall heard the incessant rant of someone who had nothing to show for himself, who had no achievements to speak of, and no reasonable suggestion to offer to the world. Instead, we saw lies, misinformation, warmongering, and malice spread through this Assembly. The words used today at this great Assembly by the leader of Pakistan (Imran Khan) demean the very essence of the United Nations," said Mijito Vinito, First Secretary, India Mission to the United Nations.
India exercised its Right of Reply after all the country speeches in the high-level debate of the 75th session of UNGA concluded on Friday. That is typically when countries start exercising the right to respond to the statements made by any other country against them.
Friday's anti-India statement made by the Pakistan Prime Minister and India's response makes it India's third Right of Reply, the first two were also made in response to Pakistan raking up the issue of Jammu and Kashmir during the ongoing 75th UNGA earlier this week.
Vinito said Imran Khan "is the same person who referred to the terrorist Osama Bin Laden as a "Martyr" in his Parliament in July".
He further said, "For a nation that is deeply buried in medievalism, it is understandable that the tenets of modern civilised society such as peace, dialogue and diplomacy are farfetched."
"This is the country that brought genocide to South Asia 39 years ago when it killed its own people. This is also the country that is shameless enough not to offer a sincere apology for the horrors it perpetrated even after so many years. This is the same country that provides pensions for dreaded and listed terrorists out of State funds. This is the same country that has the dubious distinction of hosting the largest number of terrorists proscribed by the United Nations," he added.
Referring to the Pakistan Prime Minister, he said, "The same leader who spewed venom today, admitted in 2019 in public in the US that his country still has about 30,000-40,000 terrorists who have been trained by Pakistan and have fought in Afghanistan and in the Indian Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir. This is the country that has systematically cleansed its minorities including Hindus, Christians, Sikhs and others, through the abuse of its blasphemy laws and through forced religious conversions."
Pakistan was characterised as "someone who professes to be a champion of Islam, this is also a country that has encouraged killing of fellow Muslims merely because they belonged to a different sect, or to a different region in Pakistan, and through sponsoring terrorist attacks against its neighbors," he added.
The First Secretary said, "What should rather be on the agenda of the UN is Pakistan's deep state and its unrelenting political and financial support to terrorist organisations and mercenaries which are a threat to global peace and security. The only crowning glory that this country has to show to the world for the last 70 years is terrorism, ethnic cleansing, majoritarian fundamentalism, and clandestine nuclear trade."
"The only way for Pakistan to become a normal country is to abjure its moral, financial and material support to terrorism, turn its attention to the problems faced by its own population including its minorities and stop misusing UN platforms to further its nefarious agenda," the statement concluded.