India, Pakistan foreign ministers trade heated barbs on ‘terror’

Pakistani minister calls India’s Modi the ‘butcher of Gujarat’ after his counterpart accuses Pakistan of being an ‘epicentre of terrorism’.

Pakistan’s Foreign Minister has called India’s Prime Minister the “butcher of Gujarat” after his counterpart accused his country of being the “epicentre of terrorism” as the nuclear-armed neighbours engage in a war of words at the United Nations, Al Jazeera reported yesterday (16).

The heated exchange between Pakistan’s Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari and India’s Subrahmanyam Jaishankar came after the UN Security Council adopted a statement on Thursday, warning of the increasing dangers of terrorism,

The South Asian rivals have strained political ties, especially over the Himalayan region of Kashmir, which was split between the two in 1947. Since then, they have fought three wars and had several skirmishes along their tense border.

New Delhi accuses Islamabad of harbouring armed fighters who launch attacks on its soil, including the 2008 Mumbai attacks that left 175 people dead, including nine attackers.

The Mumbai attackers were allegedly members of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba armed group. Indian investigators say their actions were directed over the phone by handlers in Pakistan.Talking to reporters after the UN meeting, Jaishankar called Pakistan the “epicentre of terrorism”.

“My advice is to clean up your act and try to be good neighbour,” he said.

“Hillary Clinton, during her visit to Pakistan, said that if you keep snakes in your back yard you can’t expect them to bite only your neighbours, eventually they will bite the people who keep them in the back yard,” he added.

Earlier, Jaishankar, without naming Pakistan, told the UN Security Council that “India faced the horrors of cross-border terrorism long before the world took serious note of it” and has “fought terrorism resolutely, bravely and with a zero-tolerance approach”.

When Bhutto-Zardari was asked to respond to Jaishankar’s allegation, he said the Indians continue to say “Muslim and terrorist together”, whether in Pakistan or in India.

Pakistan’s top diplomat said Jaishankar should remember that “Osama bin Laden is dead, [but] the butcher of Gujarat lives and he is the Prime Minister of India”.

India’s Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi was Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat when religious riots, in 2002, killed nearly 2,000 people – most of them Muslims.

Modi was accused of turning a blind eye to the violence. Until his election as Prime Minister, in 2014, he was denied entry to the United States.

Bhutto-Zardari said his country had lost far more lives to terrorism and that he, himself, was a victim, referring to his mother and former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated by a suicide bomber in 2007. Bhutto was the first woman elected to lead a Muslim-majority country in 1988.

“As a Muslim, as a Pakistani, as a victim of terrorism, I believe it is time that we move away from some of the Islamophobic narrative framing of this issue that took place after the awful attacks of September 11, 2001, because what we witnessed from that date up until now is that terrorism, of course, knows no religion, knows no boundaries,” Bhutto-Zardari said.

“Why would we want our own people to suffer? We absolutely do not,” he added.

Abdul Basit, research fellow at S Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, told Al Jazeera the “debate on terrorism cannot be reduced to Pakistan-bashing on platforms like the UN”.

“In bringing the attention back to counterterrorism challenges, India is focusing heavily on Pakistan as the main sponsor of terrorism in South Asia, which has been one of the usual tactics by India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP),” he said.

Qandil Abbas, professor of international relations at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, said Bhutto-Zardari’s comments “should be seen from the lens of recent differences between India and Pakistan, which emerged after India revoked … autonomy of Indian-administered Kashmir”.

“Pakistan was expecting that the Indian decision will be condemned and international community will support the stance presented by Pakistan. However, it was not to be,” he told Al Jazeera.

“Additionally, despite Pakistan’s partnership with America and the Western bloc the in so-called ‘war on terror’, India continued to receive more importance,” he added.