SOURCE: THE PRINT
Pakistan has claimed that India sent a message to Islamabad expressing its “desire for a conversation”, but Islamabad insists that Kashmir be a party in the talks. The claim was made in an interview by Moeed W. Yusuf, Special Assistant on national security and strategic policy planning to Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan, to an Indian media portal Tuesday.
However, there was no confirmation on this from New Delhi.
During the 75-minute interview to journalist Karan Thapar, which was published on The Wire, Yusuf said Pakistan is willing to talk on both issues concerning Kashmir as well as terrorism.
“I want to talk about both,” Yusuf said in the interview, adding that Pakistan “stands for peace and we want to move forward”.
He also said India must “reverse” the decision on Kashmir referring to the revocation of Article 370 last August, which they view as “military siege” in the Valley, and also demanded a “roll back of the new domicile law”.
Yusuf also said India’s move to scrap Article 370 is “not an internal matter” of New Delhi but a “matter for the UN”. He also said “Kashmiris hate Indians”.
ThePrint reached the Ministry of External Affairs via email for a comment on the matter, but there was no response until the publication of this report.
Referring to India’s National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, Yusuf said, “Compare me to my counterpart in India” and added that his objective is to “increase the political space” for Prime Minister Khan.
He also said equating Prime Minister Khan’s silence on Uyghur Muslims, a Turkic-speaking ethnic minority in China, with his accusations of a genocide in Kashmir is “false equivalence” and that the former is a “non-issue” and he “was hundred per cent satisfied that the Uyghurs were being treated properly by the Chinese government and that there was no problem”.
Jadhav has been caught ‘pants down’
On the issue of former Indian Navy officer Kulbhushan Jadhav, who is presently serving a death sentence in Pakistan over charges of espionage and terrorism, Yusuf said he was caught with “pants down”.
“He refused to accept that Pakistan has denied India unimpeded and unconditional consular access and repeatedly would not answer why a Pakistani official was always present at meetings with Jadhav and why Pakistan insisted on recording the meetings,” the report said.
Yusuf also accused India of perpetrating terror in Pakistan and claimed that the “handler of the 2014 terrorist attack on an Army school in Peshawar was in touch with an Indian consulate”. He added: “We have evidence to the T.”
“Yusuf also accused the Indian Embassy in Afghanistan of using think-tanks as a front to funnel money to Baloch terrorists. He claimed the Balochistan National Army commander had been treated in a hospital in Delhi,” the report stated.
