New York: Exercising its right of reply in the general debate at the ongoing UN General Assembly Session here, India slammed Pakistan for its “support to terrorism”, labelling it as “Terroristan”.
“In its short history, Pakistan has become a geography synonymous with terror,” Eenam Gambhir, First Secretary in India’s Permanent Mission to the UN, said on Thursday in response to Pakistani Prime Minister Shahid Abbasi’s statement that “the struggle” of the people in Kashmir was being “brutally suppressed by India”.
“The quest for land of pure has actually produced a ‘land of pure terror’,” Gambhir said.
“Pakistan is now ‘Terroristan’ with a flourishing industry producing and exporting global terrorism.”
Gambhir said that the current state of Pakistan could be gauged from the fact that Hafiz Saeed, leader of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, was now seeking to be legitimised as a leader of a political party.
She described Pakistan as a country whose counter-terrorism policy is to “mainstream and upstream terrorists by either providing safe havens to global terror leaders in its military town, or protecting them with political careers”.
It is an obvious reference to Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden being tracked down and eliminated by US forces in Pakistan’s Abbottabad city.
Stating that nothing can justify Pakistan’s avaricioius efforts to covet territories of its neighbours, Gambhir said: “In so far as India is concerned, Pakistan must understand that the state of Jammu and Kashmir is and will always remain an integral part of India. However much it scales up cross-border terrorism, it will never succeed in undermining India’s territorial integrity.”
Ridiculing Pakistan for its complaints about the consequences it faced for its counter-terrorism efforts, she said that “the polluter, in this case, is paying the price”.
“Terroristan is in fact a territory whose contribution to the globalisation of terror is unparalleled,” Gambhir added.
