In a sharp rebuttal to Pakistan Army Chief General Asim Munir’s remarks calling Kashmir Pakistan’s “jugular vein”, India asserted that the only link between Kashmir and Pakistan is Islamabad’s illegal occupation of part of the region that must be vacated.
“How can anything foreign be in a jugular vein? This is a union territory of India. Its only relationship with Pakistan is the vacation of illegally occupied territories by that country,” Ministry of External affairs (MEA) Spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said in a briefing on Thursday.
General Munir, while addressing a gathering of overseas Pakistanis, reiterated Pakistan’s longstanding rhetoric on Kashmir and defended the controversial two-nation theory that led to the Partition in 1947. “Our stance is absolutely clear, it was our jugular vein, it will be our jugular vein, we will not forget it. We will not leave our Kashmiri brothers in their heroic struggle,” Munir said.
He also claimed that Pakistanis are bound by a “superior ideology and culture” and urged the diaspora to pass down the story of Pakistan’s creation, rooted in the belief that Muslims and Hindus were fundamentally different in “religion, customs, traditions, and ambitions”.
