‘Ruling elite destroyed the country’: Interior minister claims Pakistan has failed on Kashmir issue

Pakistan’s interior minister claims the “ruling elite” has “destroyed the country” and failed to garner international support over the Kashmir conflict with India, in a high-profile embarrassment for the Khan administration.

“People do not believe us in the international community. We say they [India] impose curfew and are not giving medicines to people of Jammu and Kashmir. People do not believe us, but they believe them,” Interior Minister Brigadier Ijaz Ahmed Shah said during a Hum News talk show appearance on Wednesday evening. 

The ruling elite has destroyed the country. The ruling elite of this country destroyed the name. People think we are not a serious nation.

When asked directly whether Imran Khan and his top advisors ranked among the “ruling elite” Shah parried, saying “Everyone is responsible. Pakistan should now do a soul searching.”

Pakistan has been snubbed repeatedly on the Kashmir issue by the international diplomatic community. The United Nations told Khan’s government to resolve the issue diplomatically but without external support, despite US President Donald Trump’s rejected offer to mediate negotiations with India.

In another embarrassing revelation during the same interview, former spy Shah admitted that Pakistan had “spent millions of rupees on Jamat ud Dawa (JuD),” an outlawed charity accused of acting as a front for the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist group which carried out the 2008 Mumbai attacks and operates within Pakistan.

“We need to demotivate the members of the proscribed organisation and bring them down to the mainstream,” Shah added. 

Earlier this week, Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi told a United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) session in Geneva that India had turned Kashmir and Jammu into the largest “caged prison in this planet”. This elicited a fierce response from New Delhi which said that Pakistan was “the epicenter of global terrorism” which uses political violence as a form of alternative diplomacy. 

Meanwhile, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan says that Washington has hung his country out to dry and that Pakistanis have suffered greatly as a result of the ongoing War on Terror.

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