In a verbal battle between the nuclear-armed neighbours at the UN, Pakistan's foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto referred to India's prime minister as the "butcher of Gujarat" after his counterpart Subrahmanyam Jaishankar claimed that his nation was the "epicentre of terrorism."
The Himalayan territory of Kashmir, which was divided between the two in 1947, has caused political tension between the competing South Asian nations. Three wars and numerous skirmishes along their volatile border have been waged since then.
Talking to reporters after the UN meeting, Jaishankar called Pakistan the “epicentre of terrorism”. “My advice is to clean up your act and try to be good neighbour,” he said. “Hillary Clinton, during her visit to Pakistan, said that if you keep snakes in your back yard you can’t expect them to bite only your neighbours, eventually they will bite the people who keep them in the back yard,” he added.
When Bilwal was asked to respond to Jaishankar’s allegation, he said the Indians continue to say “Muslim and terrorist together”, whether in Pakistan or in India. He said Jaishankar should remember that “Osama bin Laden is dead, [but] the butcher of Gujarat lives and he is the prime minister of India”.
When religious riots in Gujarat, India, killed over 2,000 people in 2002, the majority of them Muslims, Narendra Modi, and the country’s Hindu nationalist prime minister was serving as the state's chief minister.
Modi was accused of turning a blind eye to the violence. Until his election as prime minister in 2014, he was denied entry to the United States. He added, his country had lost far more lives to terrorism and that he, himself, was a victim, referring to his mother and former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated by a suicide bomber in 2007. Bhutto was the first woman elected to lead a Muslim-majority country in 1988.
“As a Muslim, as a Pakistani, as a victim of terrorism, I believe it is time that we move away from some of the Islamophobic narrative framing of this issue that took place after the awful attacks of September 11, 2001, because what we witnessed from that date up until now is that terrorism, of course, knows no religion, knows no boundaries,” Bilawal said. “Why would we want our own people to suffer? We absolutely do not,” he added.
In a statement released by Arindam Bagchi, spokesman for India’s foreign ministry, called Pakistan minister’s remarks a “new low”. “The Foreign Minister of Pakistan has obviously forgotten this day in 1971, which was a direct result of the genocide unleashed by Pakistani rulers against ethnic Bengalis and Hindus. Unfortunately, Pakistan does not seem to have changed much in the treatment of its minorities. It certainly lacks credentials to cast aspersions at India,” said the statement, referring to Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan.
BJP holds protests across Gujarat
A series of demonstrations were organized by the BJP in various parts of Gujarat against Bilawal's Bhutto for his remarks against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Gujarat. BJP workers raised slogans against Bilawal and burnt his effigies in some places. The protests were held in Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar, Vadodara, Botad, Rajkot, Mahisagar , Junagadh and many other places. In Gandhinagar, a delegation led by state BJP’s Yuva Morcha president Prashant Korat submitted a memorandum to governor Acharya Devvrat at Raj Bhavan. The memorandum criticizes Pakistan and Bhutto.