India delivered a sharp rebuke to Pakistan at the United Nations Security Council Open Debate on “Leadership for Peace,” calling out Islamabad’s record on terrorism, democracy, and its repeated references to Jammu and Kashmir.
India’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Ambassador Harish Parvathaneni, reiterated that the Union Territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh are “an integral and inalienable part of India,” stressing that they “were, are, and will always remain so.”
Responding to Pakistan’s remarks during the debate, Parvathaneni accused Islamabad of having an “obsessive focus on harming India and its people” and described Pakistan as the “global epicentre of terror.”
Explaining India’s decision to hold the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance, Parvathaneni said the agreement was signed 65 years ago in good faith, but Pakistan repeatedly violated its spirit by waging wars and sponsoring terrorism.
“Throughout these six and a half decades, Pakistan has violated the spirit of the Treaty by inflicting three wars and thousands of terror attacks on India,” he said.
He noted that tens of thousands of Indian lives have been lost to Pakistan-sponsored terror over the past four decades, citing the April terror attack in Pahalgam, Jammu and Kashmir, in which 26 civilians, including a foreign national, were killed.
“It is in this backdrop that India has finally announced that the Treaty will be held in abeyance until Pakistan credibly and irrevocably ends its support for cross-border and all other forms of terrorism,” Parvathaneni said.
In a scathing attack on Pakistan’s internal political situation, the Indian envoy highlighted what he called the erosion of democracy in the country.
“Pakistan, of course, has a unique way of respecting the will of its people — by jailing a Prime Minister, by banning the ruling political party, and by letting its armed forces engineer a constitutional coup through the 27th amendment and giving lifetime immunity to its Chief of Defence Forces,” he said, referring to former Prime Minister Imran Khan, the banning of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), and the immunity granted to Army Chief Asim Munir.
Parvathaneni concluded by asserting India’s resolve: “Let me be clear — India will counter Pakistan-sponsored terrorism in all its forms and manifestations with all its might.”
The response came after Pakistan’s UN representative, Asim Iftikhar Ahmad, reiterated claims that Jammu and Kashmir remains an “unresolved dispute” and criticised India’s suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty, calling it a “blatant breach of international obligations.”
India firmly rejected those assertions, maintaining that Pakistan’s continued support for terrorism undermines any claim of seeking peace in South Asia.