India on Thursday said Pakistan has no locus standi on Kashmir and no country is backing it on the ‘current issue’. Addressing an event in Leh, the main city of Ladakh which has been bifurcated from Kashmir Valley on August 5, Indian Defence Minister Rajnath Singh asked how can India talk to Pakistan when it keeps trying to destabilize India using terror.
India wants to have good neighbourly relationship with Pakistan, but it should first stop exporting terror to India, Singh said. He asserted that Pakistan has no locus standi on Kashmir. "I want to ask Pakistan when had Kashmir belonged to it? Kashmir was always part of India," he said.
Pakistan should focus on addressing human rights violations and atrocities in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, the Defence Minister said. He said US Defense Secretary Mark Esper had, during a telephonic conversation recently, told him that abrogation of Article 370 was an internal matter of India.
Singh’s remarks came amid Pakistan’s desperate efforts to internationalize India’s move to abrogate the Constitution’s Article 370 that had given a special status to Jammu and Kashmir for seventy years and split Kashmir and Ladakh in separate federally-ruled territories. Singh said, "No country is with Pakistan on the current issue."