Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi on Thursday said India faced expulsion by Iran in Chabahar project due to its wrong policies, adding that the country has gradually strained its relations with all its neighbours – Pakistan, China, Nepal and Bangladesh.
In a statement, Qureshi said India is spoiling its relations due to a ‘Hindutva mindset’. “The so-called impression of a ‘Shining India’ is over now owing to incumbent government’s policies of hatred and bias,” he added.
Earlier this month it emerged that Iran had dropped India from the Chabahar rail project citing delayed finances. The railway project, which was being discussed between the Iranian Railways and the state-owned Indian Railways Construction Ltd (IRCON), was meant to be part of India’s commitment to the trilateral agreement between India, Iran and Afghanistan to build an alternative trade route to Afghanistan and Central Asia. India is also set to lose an ambitious gas field project in the country that had been in the pipeline for past 10 years.
Regarding Pakistan’s relations with Bangladesh, the minister said Pakistan wants to maintain good bilateral ties by ‘forgetting bitterness of past and moving towards a good future’. He mentioned that Pakistan had also appointed a new ambassador to Bangladesh.
He said that the President-elect of United Nations General Assembly, Ambassador Volkan Bozkir is due to visit Pakistan on Monday.
Qureshi said he would present to Bozkir Pakistan’s position on Indian-held Kashmir, which is suffering the worst human rights situation in the world. The minister said that he would also inform Bozkir about the atrocities committed by the Indian Army in the occupied valley. Qureshi stressed that India was violating international law by targeting civilians along the Line of Control.
Qureshi termed the visit of foreign media journalists to the Line of Control (LoC) in Chirikot sector a day earlier ‘an important step’ in this regard. The journalists, he said, were escorted by the military to the region to witness the plight of residents living along the frontier.
Qureshi said the journalists had been invited by Pakistan to ‘show them the double standards of India’. “Will India follow suit and allow independent media to visit the occupied valley?” he questioned, adding that India is also restricting movement of UN-deployed observers to hide the truth.
Since BJP government came in power, there has been an increase in ceasefire violations. According to the Foreign Office, India has committed 1,697 ceasefire violations this year to date, resulting in 14 deaths and serious injuries to 133 civilians.
The foreign journalists interacted with the victims of India’s continued ceasefire violations and witnessed the situation in Poonch sector, where the civilian population suffered frequent targeting by Indian side with heavy weapons, mortars and cluster ammunition. The international media witnessed military posts deployed along the LoC eyeball-to-eyeball. They were shown the India’s surveillance grid and obstacle system along the LoC having a depth of anti-infiltration grid of 3-4 kms from the LoC.
Thursday was the 347th day of continued siege of Indian-held Kashmir by more than 900,000 Indian troops with ratio of one soldier for every eight Kashmiris after the August 5, 2019, illegal actions aimed at changing demographics of the occupied territory.
