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Kabul: India’s Foreign Minister S Jaishankar has accused his visiting Pakistani counterpart Bilawal Bhutto Zardari of being the “promoter, justifier and spokesperson” of terrorism during a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), marking an open hostility against his country’s rivaling neighbor.
“Victims of terrorism do not sit together with its perpetrators to discuss terrorism,” Jaishankar said after a meeting of foreign ministers of the member nations of the SCO in the city of Goa.
India’s top diplomat was reacting to a statement posted on Twitter earlier in the day by Bhutoo-Zardari about ““weaponizing terrorism” in which he urged SCO member nations to avoid using “terrorism” as a diplomatic instrument.
Jaishankar’s hostile remarks targeting his Pakistani counterpart came also in reaction of a militant attack earlier on Friday that killed five Indian Army officers in the Rajouri district of Jammu and Kashmir, a restive, mostly Muslim-populated region that remains fervently opposed to India’s rule of the area near the Pakistani border.
India regularly attributes the militant attacks in the region to suspected Pakistani intruders.
“They are committing acts of terrorism. I don’t want to jump the gun on what happened today, but we are all feeling equally outraged,” Jaishankar said at the SCO meeting as quoted in local press reports.
