WASHINGTON DC: The United States and the international community “must do more” to pressure India to end its militarized curfew over Kashmir, Pakistan Ambassador in Washington Asad Majeed Khan said on Wednesday.
During a wide-ranging interview with The Washington Times, Khan said that India’s Prime Minister Modi has turned a vast section of the disputed Muslim-majority region into “practically a concentration camp.”
Khan lamented that millions of people inside Indian-occupied Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) have been on lockdown without access to medicine or electricity, let alone telephones and internet, for nearly a month now since the BJP-led Hindu nationalist government stripped the held valley of its special constitutional status.
“Thousands are being put in prison,” he said. “The world needs to be aware [of the detentions].”
Khan also weighed in on the prospect of a breakthrough in US peace talks with the Taliban in neighboring war-torn Afghanistan and on Islamabad’s delicate balancing act as a partner of both China, the emerging superpower, and the United States.
The ambassador praised President Trump for not taking sides in the decades-old conflict over the territory, but he said more must be done. He said, “no other country has the same clout or influence as the US to basically urge India, to nudge India.”
Azad Jammu and Kashmir Prime Minister Raja Farooq Haider Khan sought to promote the same message on a visit to Washington this week. He said, in an interview on Tuesday, that he wanted “to give a wake-up call to the United States that [it] should intervene immediately.”
“It has all the capabilities,” said the prime minister, who called on the Trump administration to demand a meeting between Indian and Pakistani leaders to stave off an escalating standoff between the two nuclear-armed South Asian nations.
