NEW DELHI: After Pakistan claimed to have unearthed “irrefutable evidence” of India’s alleged involvement in terrorist activities, India hit back on Sunday and said concocting documents and peddling false narratives would not absolve Pakistan of terror sponsorship.
Calling upon Islamabad to end its support to cross-border terrorism, the government said in a statement that even the country’s leaders had never hidden the fact that Pakistan had become a factory for producing terrorists.
This was yet another futile anti-India propaganda exercise which sought to justify cross-border terrorism, the government said.
“The so called claims of ‘proof’ against India enjoy no credibility, are fabricated and represent figment of imagination. This desperate attempt will find few takers as the international community is aware of Pakistan’s tactics and proof of its terror sponsorship has been admitted by none other than its own leadership,” MEA spokesperson Anurag Srivastava said, adding India was confident the world would hold Pakistan to account.
India’s reaction came a day after Pakistani foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi addressed a press conference, alongside Army spokesman Maj Gen Babar Iftikhar, in which he presented audio clips to claim that India was behind some of the terror attacks in Pakistan.
While Islamabad had claimed that Indian diplomats in Afghanistan were promoting terrorist activities, the Kabul government rejected these allegations as baseless. The Afghan government said it would never allow anyone to use its soil for disruptive activities against any third country.
The government recalled that the face of global terror, Osama bin Laden, was found in Pakistan and that Pakistani PM Imran Khan glorified him as a “martyr” from the floor of Parliament. “He admitted the presence of 40,000 terrorists in Pakistan, their science and technology minister proudly claimed involvement and success of Pakistan, led by its prime minister, in the Pulwama terror attack in which 40 Indian soldiers were martyred,” Srivastava said.
Despite repeated calls for restraint and adherence to the ceasefire understanding of 2003 for maintaining peace and tranquillity, he said, Pakistani forces continued to engage in providing cover fire to infiltrators.
India had summoned Pakistan's charge d’affaires on Saturday to lodge a strong protest over unprovoked ceasefire violations by Pakistani forces in multiple sectors along the LoC in J&K on November 13, resulting in the death of four civilians and serious injuries to 19 others.