NEW YORK: India delivered a sharp rebuke to Pakistan at the United Nations, accusing Islamabad of misusing the world body's forum for propaganda while failing to protect its own people, and demanding that it vacate all territories under its illegal occupation in Jammu and Kashmir.
The intervention came during an interactive dialogue with the Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues at the United Nations General Assembly's Third Committee, which deals with social, humanitarian and cultural questions. Speaking for India, First Secretary at the country's Permanent Mission to the UN, Raghoo Puri, said Pakistan's representatives should focus on the welfare of their own citizens instead of taking directions from the military.
"Pakistan predictably misused the forum for propaganda. Jammu and Kashmir is an integral and inalienable part of India. Pakistan must vacate the territory under its illegal occupation," Mr Puri said. He added that Pakistan's representatives would do well to look inwards and prioritise the welfare of their own people rather than acting on military directives.
The exchange was the latest in a series of pointed interventions by Indian diplomats at the UN this week, and it followed a similar clash two days earlier.
On that occasion, India's First Secretary Bhavika Mangalanandan, speaking during an interactive dialogue with the Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, had questioned Pakistan's record on religious freedom and the protection of minorities, and challenged its advocacy on funeral rights in exceptional circumstances.
"In Pakistan, the number of minorities is shrinking, and their rights are regularly abused. A state that cannot ensure the safety of its own minorities has no standing to lecture India," Ms Mangalanandan had said. She also cautioned against using human suffering to serve political interests and called for a more impartial approach to reporting violations of religious freedom.
Ms Mangalanandan's intervention carried a striking historical reference. She recalled that Pakistani soldiers killed during the 1999 Kargil conflict had been buried by Indian troops with military honours and according to Islamic customs, after Pakistan itself declined to accept the bodies of its own soldiers.
"It is deeply ironic that a state that did not even accept the bodies of its own soldiers who were killed in combat in 1999 in Kargil, unabashedly speaks with fervour on faith, religious freedom and burials," she said.
The Indian representative also challenged Pakistan's comments on Jammu and Kashmir, arguing that Islamabad should address developments in the territories under its own control rather than commenting on the Indian Union Territory. She specifically referred to Rawalakot in Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir, a region where protests over governance and rights have drawn attention in recent years.
In his own intervention, Mr Puri broadened the argument beyond the immediate dispute. Highlighting India's commitment to minorities, he said that the protection of minority rights is primarily the sovereign duty of states, guided by the principle of sovereign equality.
He pointed out that India's civilisational ethos of diversity is firmly reflected in its constitutional safeguards for both religious and linguistic minorities, and underlined that minorities have contributed immensely to India's national development, including at the highest levels of government and in key institutions.
The remarks come against a backdrop of long-standing concerns over the treatment of minorities in Pakistan. Experts cited by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights have warned that coercion and weak legal safeguards are enabling forced conversions through marriage, particularly among Hindu and Christian communities, and particularly in Sindh province.
Reports of abductions and forced marriages involving minority girls have repeatedly surfaced, and UN experts have emphasised that conversion must be voluntary and that child marriage undermines consent under international law.
India also questioned the approach of the Special Rapporteur's report itself. Ms Mangalanandan objected to what she described as an emphasis on discrimination and shortcomings in countries of the Global South, while similar tragedies in developed nations were not adequately addressed.
She asked how a report could claim that all discrimination and wrong practices during the COVID-19 pandemic supposedly took place only in the Global South, and said that deriving political mileage out of people's pain and loss should not be the basis on which Special Rapporteurs build their relevance.
The exchanges illustrate a pattern that has become familiar at the United Nations in recent years. Pakistan regularly raises Jammu and Kashmir in UN forums, and India responds by turning the focus back to Pakistan's own record, on minorities, on governance in the territories it controls, and on the role of its military in civilian affairs.
Each side's intervention is aimed as much at the wider membership of the UN as at the other, and the Third Committee, with its broad membership, is a favoured stage for both.
For India, the week's interventions served two purposes. The first was to restate, in unambiguous terms, its position that Jammu and Kashmir is an integral and inalienable part of the country and that Pakistan must vacate the territory under its illegal occupation. The second was to frame the minority-rights debate on its own terms: as a question of sovereign responsibility, constitutional safeguards and the lived record of states, rather than as a platform for propaganda.
Whether the exchanges change anything on the ground is another matter. The UN's human rights mechanisms have no enforcement power over either country, and the Kashmir dispute has resisted resolution for nearly eight decades.
But as a statement of how India intends to conduct its diplomacy on the issue, the week's interventions were unusually direct: they named Pakistan's military, invoked the Kargil dead, and demanded the vacation of occupied territory in the same breath as defending India's own constitutional order.
The week's exchanges also drew attention in diplomatic circles because they coincided with the General Assembly's broader debate on the protection of minorities, a subject on which states are often judged as much by their own records as by their rhetoric.
India's decision to pair its demand on Jammu and Kashmir with a detailed defence of its constitutional safeguards suggested a deliberate strategy: to present the country not merely as a respondent to Pakistan's charges, but as a state confident enough in its own record to invite comparison. Whether other member states accept that framing will become clear in the weeks ahead, as the committee's work continues.
(Reporting based on The Times of India and Republic World.)