- Monday, April 29, 2024
Washington, however, urged the South Asian neiughbours to avoid escalation and find a resolution through dialogue.
By: Shubham Ghosh
THE United States on Monday (8) said it has been closely following reports that have accused India of carrying out targeted killings on Pakistani soil and added that it encourages the two South Asian rivals to find a solution through dialogue.
New Delhi last week rejected the charges, reported by The Guardian citing Pakistani evidence, as “false and malicious anti-India propaganda”.
When asked about the allegations, US state department spokesperson Matthew Miller said Washington would not intervene in the issue but urged New Delhi and Islamabad to avoid escalation.
“We have been following the media reports about this issue. We don’t have any comment on the underlying allegations. But of course, while we’re not going to get in the middle of this situation, we encourage both sides to avoid escalation and find a resolution through dialogue,” he said.
Read: India ordered killings in Pakistan, reveal intelligence officials of both countries: report
Indian defence minister Rajnath Singh, however, came up with a hard reaction to the report as he said in an interview that India would enter Pakistan to kill anyone who crosses the border after trying to carry out attacks on his country’s soil. Islamabad denounced his remarks as “provocative”.
Read: Pakistan defence minister hopeful about better ties with India after upcoming elections
Yogi Adityanath, a prominent leader of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and the chief minister of its most populous state Uttar Pradesh who is known for his hardline stance, also spoke on the matter during an election rally in the north-western state of Rajasthan bordering Pakistan. Referring to The Guardian report, he said India knows how to protect its borders and its people and asked whether it was wrong to eliminate terrorists.
The Guardian report claimed that Indian intelligence agencies were involved in the targeted killings as part of an emboldened stance on national security following a deadly terror attack on a convoy of Indian troops in Jammu and Kashmir, killing nearly 40 personnel in February 2019.
The report cited evidence supplied by Pakistan and interviews with intelligence personnel from both sides of the border, also said that New Delhi “has implemented a policy of targeting those it considers hostile to India”.
It also quoted Pakistani officials who accused sleeper cells of the Indian intelligence set up in the UAE of the killings. The report also cited an unidentified Indian official saying that New Delhi was inspired from Mossad and KGB — intelligence agencies of Israel and Russia, respectively, that have been linked to extrajudicial killings on foreign soil — and the brutal murder of Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2018.
India and Pakistan, both of which are nuclear-armed, have fought more than one war since getting Independence in August 1947.
New Delhi refuted the charges quoting its external affairs minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar who had said recently that targeted killings on foreign soil were not his country’s policy.
India has in recent times found itself at odds with western nations such as Canada and the US over the murder of Sikh separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Canada last June and an alleged plot to eliminate another such leader, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, in the US.
