ISLAMABAD: Minister of Defence, Engineer Khurram Dastgir Khan said on Monday that understanding India as a pretentious regional power was important for Pakistan as well as for the rest of the world.
Addressing a seminar, “India: A Pretentious Regional Power” as chief guest, the minister said that Pakistan in particular would have to understand India on that account (as a pretentious regional power) so as to ensure it is prepared to meet any challenge militarily.
“India has presented to the world a particular face: a rising India, a shining India, secular and democratic India...but this belies the harsh realities of the millions of impoverished citizens of the country, whose voices and faces remain hidden,” he said.
Dastgir said that for India as well as Pakistan, non-traditional security threats that affected people’s lives and livelihoods such as water insecurity, climate change and the like should be seriously tackled.
He said while Pakistan had for several decades been raising the issue of human rights abuses in Kashmir, it was only now that the international community was beginning; and that too inadequately to notice the violence committed by Indian state agencies. Whatever values a country espouses is how it treats its minorities and India has failed on that account.
Indeed, it would also bode well for India and its citizens to forego pretensions and delusions that surround gross violations of human rights in the country, listen to sane voices from its own midst and address the massive issues of poverty and other such concerns, he added.
For Pakistan, he said the real response to these developments was to focus on its own developments, economic growth and political stability.
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