ISLAMABAD: Defence Minister Khawaja Asif on Friday hit back at United States (US) and India for mentioning Pakistan in a joint statement after a meeting of President Joe Biden and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, ARY News reported.
Taking to Twitter, the federal minister pointed out that “the irony of this statement coming during the visit of someone who was banned entry to the US for overseeing a pogrom of Muslims when he was CM Gujarat”.
Lambasting the Indian PM, Khawaja Asif said that Narendra Modi leads yet another campaign of state sponsored terrorism in Kashmir, which includes routinely maiming and blinding the local population.
The irony of this statement coming during the visit of someone who was banned entry to the U.S. for overseeing a pogrom of Muslims when he was CM Gujarat. He leads yet another campaign of state sponsored terrorism in Kashmir, which includes routinely maiming and blinding the…
— Khawaja M. Asif (@KhawajaMAsif) June 23, 2023
“Across the rest of the country, Modi’s acolytes lynch Muslims, Christians, and other minorities, with impunity,” the minister wrote.
The defence minister also stressed that “Pakistan has lost countless lives, and has been continuously at war with terrorism for decades now, owing to failed American interventions in the region”.
“Perhaps President Biden should consider these facts the next time he fetes the Butcher of Gujarat,” Asif said.
Meanwhile, Khawaja Asif – while addressing the National Assembly (NA) floor – said that Narendra Modi oversaw the killings of thousands of Muslims and rape of Muslim women in Gujarat during his tenure as the Chief Minister and in recognition of those atrocities, the US, at that time, had imposed ban on issuing a visa to him.
The minister said the Indian PM continues to target the minorities especially the Muslims. “There is an undeclared curfew in Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK) and the people there are living under restrictions of all sorts in blatant violation of human rights,” he added.
He further said that the Indian government was perpetrating state terrorism in illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir.
Turning to the relations with the United States, Khawaja Asif said Pakistan today was paying a heavy price of serving as a frontline state in the two Afghan wars.
He said the terrorism entered Pakistan because it acted as an ally of the United States (US) in the war on terrorism. He regretted that the sacrifices of Pakistan were not acknowledged.
A day earlier, the White House issued a statement saying that both Modi and Biden “strongly condemned cross-border terrorism, the use of terrorist proxies and called on Pakistan to take immediate action to ensure that no territory under its control is used for launching terrorist attacks”.
“President Biden and Prime Minister Modi reiterated the call for concerted action against all UN-listed terrorist groups including Al-Qaeda, ISIS/Daesh, Lashkar e-Tayyiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), and Hizb-ul-Mujhahideen,” the joint statement had said.
