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(Bloomberg) — Donald Trump found himself drawn deeper into a decades-long dispute between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir region on Monday, as Pakistan’s prime minister expressed frustration about a rally his Indian counterpart staged with the U.S. president a day earlier.
ISLAMABAD – Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan said that he intended toprivately discuss Kashmir with Trump, after the president’s participationin the Houston rally on Sunday with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.But journalists asked Khan and Trump about it ahead of a meeting on thesidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.
“So I was going to say that, when you’re supposed to meet Narendra Modi,now I would have asked you to at least lift the siege,” he told Trump.“It’s a huge humanitarian crisis taking place.”
The Houston rally, called “Howdy, Modi,” gave Modi the opportunity todemonstrate his rapport with Trump, whom he endorsed to tens of thousandsof Indian-Americans who attended. But Modi also drew Trump into offeringtacit support for the Indian leader’s moves to expand his country’sauthority over the parts of Kashmir it controls. India and Pakistan, whichboth possess nuclear weapons, have fought two major wars over the territoryand regularly skirmish across the Line of Control that divides it.
“Border security is vital to the United States. Border security is vital toIndia, we understand that,” Trump said at the Houston event. He pledged tofight “radical Islamic terrorism” and insisted: “We must protect ourborders.”
In a speech that followed Trump’s remarks, Modi obliquely criticizedPakistan and accused it of harboring terrorists, then assured the crowdthat Trump was committed to fighting terrorism.
Trump indicated on Monday that he had been surprised. “I didn’t know I wasgoing to hear that statement, I would say. I heard a very aggressivestatement yesterday,” though he didn’t specify which of the Indian primeminister’s remarks he was referring to.
Modi charged at the Houston event that “people have put their hatred ofIndia at the center of their political agenda,” without naming Pakistan.“These are people who want unrest. These are people who support terrorismand nurture terrorism.”
He rhetorically asked who was responsible for the 2008 terror attacks inMumbai and the 2001 attacks in the U.S. “You know them, very well,” Modisaid. “You know who they are. It’s not just you, the whole world knows whothey are.”
Modi in August scrapped seven decades of autonomy in the Muslim-majoritystate of Jammu and Kashmir, prompting Pakistan to downgrade diplomatic andtrade ties with India. Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar saidlast week that India ultimately expects to rule over the entire state ofKashmir.
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Khan said in his meeting with Trump that “8 million people are under siegeby 900,000 troops” in Kashmir and “that this is the beginning of a crisis.
“I honestly feel that this crisis is going to get much bigger, what ishappening in Kashmir,” he said.
The U.S. has a responsibility to help defuse it, he said.
“Just the fact that the position of the United States — it’s the mostpowerful country, it can affect the United Nations Security Council, it hasa voice, so we look to the U.S. to put out flames in the world,” he said.
Trump said of Kashmir that “I’d like to see everything work out, I want itto be humane, I want everybody to be treated well.” -Bloomberg
SOURCE:link
–With assistance from Archana Chaudhary.
To contact the reporter on this story: Josh Wingrove in Washington atjwingrove4@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alex Wayne atawayne3@bloomberg.net, Justin Blum
