India’s Permanent Mission to the UN once again pushed back sharply against Pakistan’s remarks on Kashmir, with diplomat Kshitij Tyagi asserting that the terrorists responsible for driving Kashmiri Pandits out of their homes were armed, trained and dispatched across the border by Pakistan itself.
“Kashmiri Pandits were driven from their homes by terrorists Pakistan armed, trained & sent across the border. Those same terrorists have since killed Kashmiris of every faith, many of them Muslim,” Tyagi said.
The remark comes amid a now-familiar pattern at UN forums, where Pakistani leaders and delegates raise Jammu and Kashmir in their addresses, prompting India to respond with its Right of Reply — a mechanism it has used repeatedly over the years to counter what New Delhi calls Islamabad’s efforts to internationalise an internal Indian matter.
Tyagi, an Indian Foreign Service officer of the 2012 batch and Counsellor at India’s Permanent Mission to the UN, has emerged as one of the country’s most prominent voices in these exchanges. Over the past year, he has delivered a string of pointed rebuttals to Pakistan at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, at one point calling Pakistan a “failed state” that “thrives on instability and survives on international handouts,” and on another occasion likening its interventions to a “dump truck” depositing “recycled falsehoods.”
His latest remarks reinforce a central theme in India’s messaging: that the violence unleashed in Kashmir since the late 1980s and early 1990s was not indiscriminate insurgency but a deliberate, cross-border campaign — one that first targeted and displaced the Kashmiri Pandit community, and has since claimed victims across all faiths, including a large number of Muslims.
The exchange adds to a long list of similar confrontations at UN platforms in recent years, where Indian diplomats — from Sneha Dubey and Mijito Vinito to Petal Gahlot and Bhavika Mangalanandan — have used their Right of Reply to reject Pakistani claims on Kashmir and to accuse Islamabad of sponsoring cross-border terrorism, even as Pakistan continues to press for the issue’s internationalisation and, in the past, has called for a UN-backed plebiscite in the region.
