India rejects Pakistan's references on Kashmir at UN

United Nations, Oct 8: India has strongly rejected Pakistan's references on Kashmir at the UN, saying such remarks are a self-serving attempt by Islamabad to bring extraneous issues to the world body for its "territorial aggrandizement".

India, exercising the Right of Reply after Pakistan's envoy to the UN Maleeha Lodhi raised the Kashmir issue at the UN, said yesterday Pakistan had made references to the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir in a self-serving attempt to bring extraneous issues before the Committee.

Such efforts were a flagrant misuse of the body for Pakistan's own territorial aggrandizement, India said, recalling that the Special Committee on Decolonisation was concerned only with Non-Self-Governing Territories.

It asserted that Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of India. Pakistan responded by saying that the United Nations recognised that all people under alien subjugation had a right to self-determination. Exercising its Right of Reply, Pakistan said India continued to perpetrate misinformation on the Kashmir issue year after year.

Raking up the Kashmir issue again at the UN, Pakistan had said the non-implementation of UN Security Council resolutions for a plebiscite in Kashmir is the "most persistent" failure of the UN.

"The decolonisation agenda of the United Nations will remain incomplete without resolution of the Jammu and Kashmir dispute, among the oldest items on the UN's agenda," Lodhi had said yesterday at a debate of the Special Political and Decolonisation Committee in the General Assembly.

She said for over six decades UN Security Council resolutions promising a plebiscite under UN auspices to allow the Kashmiri people to determine their destiny, have not been implemented.

"This is the most persistent failure of the United Nations," she said, adding generation after generation of Kashmiris has only seen broken promises and brutal oppression.

She asserted that Jammu and Kashmir "never was and can never be" an integral part of India but is a disputed territory, the final status of which has yet to be determined in accordance with several resolutions of the UN Security Council.

Lodhi said the UN has a moral responsibility towards people suffering under colonial domination and foreign occupation. "There is an urgent need to bring the work on this unfinished agenda to closure and eliminate the last remaining vestiges of colonialism. We hope that we will be able to achieve this shared goal sooner rather than later," she said.

PTI