ISLAMABAD: Pakistan on Friday blamed India for rendering the eight-member South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) bloc “dysfunctional,” rejecting New Delhi’s claims about the 19th regional summit and India-administered Kashmir. 

An Indian ministry of external affairs (MEA) spokesperson on Thursday said there was no “material change” in the situation that would allow holding of the stalled SAARC summit, days after the Pakistani foreign minister said Islamabad was ready to host the summit and that India could attend it virtually if Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi could not come to Islamabad to attend it. 

On Friday, a spokesperson for the Pakistani foreign office said that India’s obstruction of the SAARC process was an “established fact.” 

“Motivated by its partisan reasons, and acting in violation of Charter provisions requiring exclusion of bilateral issues, India was responsible for stymieing the 19th SAARC summit scheduled to take place in Pakistan in 2016,” Asim Iftikhar Ahmad, the Pakistani foreign office spokesperson, said in a statement. 

“India’s myopic attitude was rendering a valuable platform for regional cooperation increasingly dysfunctional. Pakistan hoped that India would review its self-serving approach and enable the SAARC process to move forward for the progress and prosperity of the peoples of South Asia.” 

For its part, the statement read, Pakistan was ready to host the next SAARC summit as soon as “artificial obstacles” created in its way were removed. 

Pakistan was to host the summit in 2016, but India boycotted the moot and persuaded a few other member states to do the same as well. 

New Delhi had expressed its inability to participate in the summit due to “prevailing circumstances” after a militant attack on an Indian army camp in Uri, India-administered Kashmir killed over a dozen Indian soldiers and wounded scores others on September 18, 2016. 

Since then, New Delhi has consistently been staying away from the summit, thus delaying the gathering of leaders of eight South Asian nations, comprising Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, the Maldives, Nepal and Sri Lanka. According to the SAARC charter, the summit cannot take place if any of the members stays out. 

In Thursday’s briefing, Indian MEA spokesperson Arindam Bagchi was also asked to comment on Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan’s remarks, seeking the international community’s attention on the Kashmir issue. 

Bagchi said the region was an “integral and inalienable part of India,” the WIRE news website reported. “The remarks were made by the prime minister of a country that openly encourages cross-border terrorism, provided shelter to Osama bin Laden and whose human rights record is known by the entire world,” he was quoted as saying. 

In response, Ahmad said that no amount of obfuscation and misrepresentation by Indian officials could hide India’s “state-terrorism” in the part of the valley it administered. 

“The egregious violations of human rights of the Kashmiri people had been extensively documented by the international human rights machinery, including in the two Kashmir reports issued by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in 2018 and 2019. In addition, Pakistan had shared several dossiers with the international community on India’s unabated human rights abuses in IIOJK and its state-terrorism against the Kashmiri people and in Pakistan,” he said. 

“India must abjure the use of state-terrorism as an instrument of policy. Pakistan will continue to resolutely oppose Indian machinations and expose its anti-peace agenda imperiling regional peace and security.” 

India must recognize the reality of the “just, legitimate and indigenous Kashmiri struggle, respect the wishes of the Kashmiri people, and grant them their inalienable right to self-determination in accordance with the UN Charter and the relevant UN Security Council resolutions,” the spokesperson added. 

Kashmir has been divided between Pakistan and India since their independence from the British rule in 1947. Both countries claim the Himalayan territory in its entirety and have fought two of their three wars over it.