India provoking with threats, 'false' reports of 'surgical strike': Pakistan

Pakistan has denied that India made any surgical strikes against it while accusing India of trying to provoke a conflict by "falsely" claiming it had carried out the operations and threatening to use more of them.

Pakistan's Permanent Representative Maleeha Lodhi raised the Kashmir issue again on Tuesday with the new twist about surgical strikes.

"By making such false claims and blatant threats, are India's leaders attempting to provoke a conflict with Pakistan?" she asked.

Her statement appeared to be a response to India's Army Chief General Bipin Rawat's warning last month, that "The strikes were more of a message we wanted to convey and these things could follow if need be."

Lodhi said: "All I can say to them is: do not underestimate Pakistan's resolve and capacity to defend itself."

"Any aggression or intervention will meet a matching and effective response from our armed forces and the people of Pakistan.

India "claims, falsely, to have conducted a so-called 'surgical strike' across the Line of Control (LOC)," she said. "This claim, and India's repeated threats to conduct such 'strikes' across the LOC," violated the UN Charter and provide "Pakistan sufficient reason to respond in exercise of its right to self-defense," she added.

India has said that it carried out a surgical strike on terrorist sites in Pakistan-held territory in September last year after a terrorist attack in the Uri sector of Kashmir that killed 18 Indian soldiers.

Lodhi also alleged that India was carrying out daily ceasefire violation along the LOC to divert attention from "its crimes against the Kashmiri people".

Having failed to gain traction for its Kashmir agenda at the recent high-level General Assembly session when none of the other 192 countries made any mention of it, Pakistan appeared to be trying to a new tack about the possibility of a South Asian conflict, which Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi had hinted at in his September speech at the UN.

"The United Nations ignore these open threats to use force by India," Lodhi said after speaking about the surgical strikes and the threats from India's leaders.

Attempts last months at the UN to raise human rights issues over Kashmir had a further setback when Lodhi used the picture of Palestinian girl as a Kashmiri victim.

(Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in)

--IANS

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