MUMBAI: India has summoned the top Pakistani diplomat in New Delhi, local media reported on Thursday, a day after it announced measures to downgrade ties with Islamabad as relations between the nuclear-armed rivals plummeted following a deadly militant attack in Kashmir.
A day after suspected militants killed 26 men at a tourist destination in Kashmir in the worst attack on civilians in the country in nearly two decades, Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri said there was cross-border involvement in the attack and New Delhi would suspend a six-decade old river-sharing treaty as well as close the only land crossing between the neighbors.
India will also pull out its defense attaches in Pakistan and also reduce staff size at its mission in Islamabad to 30 from 55, Misri said.
India has summoned the top diplomat in the Pakistan embassy in New Delhi, local media reported, to give notice that all defense advisers in the Pakistani mission were persona non grata and given a week to leave, one of the measures Misri announced on Wednesday.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has called for an all-party meeting with opposition parties on Thursday, to brief them on the government’s response to the attack.
In Islamabad, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif was scheduled to hold a meeting of the National Security Committee to discuss Pakistan’s response, Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar said in a post on X.
The Indus water treaty, mediated by the World Bank, split the Indus River and its tributaries between the neighbors and regulated the sharing of water. It had so far withstood even wars between the neighbors.
India would hold the treaty in abeyance, Misri said.
Diplomatic ties between the two countries were weak even before the latest measures were announced as Pakistan had expelled India’s envoy and not posted its own ambassador in New Delhi after India revoked the semi-autonomous status of Kashmir in 2019.
Tuesday’s attack is seen as a setback to what Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party have projected as a major achievement in revoking the special status Jammu and Kashmir enjoyed and bringing peace and development to the long-troubled Muslim-majority region.
India calls all-party meet, summons top Pakistani diplomat after Kashmir attack on tourists
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India calls all-party meet, summons top Pakistani diplomat after Kashmir attack on tourists
- The development follows the killing of 26 people at a tourist resort in Indian-administered Kashmir
- New Delhi has further downgraded diplomatic ties, alleging cross-border involvement from Pakistan
Rating firm S&P says it won’t rush Iran war downgrades, sees risks for countries like Pakistan
- Agency says it is monitoring indebted energy importers as higher oil prices strain finances
- Gulf economies seen better placed to weather shock, though Bahrain flagged as vulnerable
LONDON: S&P Global said it would not make any knee-jerk sovereign rating cuts following the outbreak of war in the Middle East, but warned on Thursday that soaring oil and gas prices were putting a number of already cash-strapped countries at risk.
The firm’s top analysts said in a webinar that the conflict, which has involved US and Israeli strikes against Iran and Iranian strikes against Israel, US bases and Gulf states, was now moving from a low- to moderate-risk scenario.
Most Gulf countries had enough fiscal buffers, however, to weather the crisis for a while, with more lowly rated Bahrain the only clear exception.
Qatar’s banking sector could also struggle if there were significant deposit outflows in reaction to the conflict, although there was no evidence of such strains at the moment, they said.
“We don’t want to jump the gun and just say things are bad,” S&P’s head global sovereign analyst, Roberto Sifon-Arevalo, said.
The longer the crisis was prolonged, though, “the more difficult it is going to be,” he added.
Sifon-Arevalo said Asia was the second-most exposed region, due to many of its countries being significant Gulf oil and gas importers.
India, Thailand and Indonesia have relatively lower reserves of oil, while the region also had already heavily indebted countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka whose finances would be further hurt by rising energy prices.
“We are closely monitoring these (countries) to see how the credit stories evolve,” Sifon-Arevalo said.
