We want peace, not war with India, says Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif
At a joint Parliament session, he accused India of thwarting their efforts to hold talks and said they were blamed for the Uri attack without any investigation.
Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Wednesday said India had accused his country of having a hand in the attack on the Army base in Uri without any inquiry. "Without any investigation, within a few hours, India blamed Pakistan for the attack. Through this one can see what India's motives are," he said, according to Dawn.
Speaking at a joint session of Parliament in Islamabad, he accused India of repeatedly thwarting Pakistan's efforts to hold talks and said he wanted to "resolve all outstanding disputes" with India through dialogue. "I would like to repeat our stance that we are against war. We want peace in the region," he said.
Sharif also said that Pakistani troops had "befittingly responded" to the Indian Army's "ceasefire violation" on September 29, which India said were surgical strikes across the Line of Control. Two Pakistani soldiers were killed in the operation that targeted terror launchpads along the LoC.
The prime minister's remark that "poverty cannot be ended by driving tanks on farmlands" seemed an apparent response to his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi's statements from September 24. Modi had said that the war they should fight should be one to see which of the two countries could defeat poverty first.
Sharif also urged world powers to intervene in the Kashmir dispute between the countries to ensure that the United Nations' resolutions on the Valley are "implemented in letter and spirit". At the joint Parliament session, Pakistan's foreign policy as well as India's efforts to "diplomatically isolate" the country were also discussed.
Relations between India and Pakistan soured since the Uri attack, in which 18 soldiers were killed, while two others succumbed to their injuries later. While India said it had carried out surgical strikes along the LoC on September 29, Pakistan had denied any such operations and said it was nothing but cross-border firing. Pakistan also denied India's accusation that it was involved in the Uri attack.