WASHINGTON: Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s special envoy to Kashmir, Senator Mushahid Hussain Syed, blasted India’s human rights record in the disputed region, citing a rising death and injury toll, including from shrapnel pellet guns. Pakistan claims 12,000 have been injured since July, including some 150 people who lost their vision due to injuries from the shrapnel pellets.
During the briefing on Tuesday, Syed blasted Washington for not doing enough to address human rights concerns in Kashmir and accused the United States of having an “infatuation” and a “love affair” with India. He speculated that a recent deal between Modi and Obama, which will allow the United States to use land, air, and naval bases in India, has helped play into the United States’ apparent willingness to look the other way on human rights concerns in Kashmir.
“It seems that politics seem to have trumped principles; in this case, the principles of human rights,” Syed said. He spoke to reporters directly after a meeting with State Department officials in Foggy Bottom.
Hussain Syed also acknowledged that other crises, including the conflict in Syria, have contributed to the Obama administration’s placing of Kashmir on the back burner. But he reminded U.S. officials that, since Pakistan and India are both nuclear powers, “the stakes are very high” and said that “the Obama administration should have placed a higher premium on the issue.”
“Just because Kashmiris do not have oil or are not in Europe or do not belong to a certain religious domination, they should not be denied those rights,” he said. “We feel that there are double standards.”
The Pakistani senator along with a member of Pakistan’s National Assembly, Shezra Kharal, is visiting Washington and other world capitals as part of a Pakistani diplomatic and PR offensive aimed at countering India’s version of the latest flare-up in Kashmir.
Despite his frustrations with Washington, Hussain Syed said he secured a promise from the State Department to include the information about recent human rights abuses and injuries sustained by civilians at the hands of Indian forces this summer in its next human rights report.
When asked, a State Department official noted that “information about human rights in the Kashmir region periodically appears in the India and/or Pakistan reports depending on the human rights conditions and events in a given year.”
Senior officials from Pakistan and India simultaneously hosted reporters on Tuesday afternoon over luncheon in the US capital in an effort to claim the high ground in a complex but increasingly deadly conflict.
The dueling luncheons demonstrated the importance both capitals place on their respective images in Washington, which maintains a complicated relationship with both South Asian rivals.
During the respective briefings, both sides cited the United States as a potential gamechanger in the decades-long conflict, although not always in the most diplomatic terms.
Tensions escalated dramatically between the two nuclear-armed foes after a militant offensive in Kashmir on Sept. 18 killed 19 Indian soldiers.
Both countries claim sovereignty over the mountainous, Muslim-majority region, but Kashmir remains divided between Indian and Pakistani-controlled areas.
The region had already been more tense than usual after Indian security forces killed Burhan Muzaffar Wani, the leader of a separatist Kashmiri militant group, in July.
Kashmir is seeing its largest protests against Indian rule in recent years, triggered by the killing of the popular separatist commander. —INP
