NEW YORK, Apr 27 (APP): India has used the armed attack in Indian Occupied Kashmir as a pretext to suspend the Indus Waters Treaty with Pakistan for domestic political purposes, Defence Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif has said, as he called for an international inquiry into the incident.
India, he told The New York Times, was taking steps to punish Pakistan “without any proof, without any investigation.”
Twentysix people were killed and several others injured in a gun attack on a group of tourists near Pahalgam, a town in the southern part of the disputed territory.
In the interview with the Times on Friday, Asif said that Pakistan was “ready to cooperate” with “any investigation which is conducted by international inspectors.
Times correspondent Julian Barnes, who interviewed the defence minister, wrote that his remarks “appeared to be aimed at defusing tensions with India”.
“We do not want this war to flare up, because flaring up of this war can cause disaster for this region,” the defence minister said.
Noting Indian officials assertion that the group that claimed responsibility for the attack is a proxy for the Lashkar-e-Taiba, a group behind the Mumbai attacks in 2008.
The defence minister disputed that allegation, saying Lashkar-e-Taiba was “defunct” and had no ability to plan or conduct attacks from the Pakistani side.
“They are finished; they don’t have any setup in Pakistan,” he said. “Those people, whatever is left of them, they are contained. Some of them are under house arrest, some of them are in custody. They are not at all active.”
Asif suggested that the attack might have been carried out by local separatist groups in occupied Kashmir pushing for more local control.
He added that Pakistan does not support separatist groups in India.
Asif also suggested that the attack could have been a “false flag” carried out by the Indian government to provoke a crisis.
Pakistan, he said, had nothing to gain from a terror attack on civilians. The Indian government, he added, was using it to marshal support and to get out of the water treaty.
The World Bank negotiated the Indus Waters Treaty, which India and Pakistan signed in 1960. By suspending the treaty, India could at some point restrict the flow of rivers into Pakistan, cutting off the country’s source of water for irrigation and human consumption, it was pointed out.
Asif, who previously served as Pakistan’s minister in charge of water supplies, said that for the last decade, India had been trying to get out of the treaty, which has been a source of stability in the region.
“They were creating excuses. They were creating problems that were not there,” he said. “They have now found an excuse to get out of this arrangement.”