Pakistan on Saturday said it was the country’s moral responsibility to expose “India’s egregious behaviour and state terrorism” in Jammu and Kashmir, whose special status was revoked on August 5. On Friday, India’s External Affairs Ministry had criticised Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan’s “provocative and irresponsible” statements on Kashmir.

“If India feels provoked, it is only because India is unwilling to face the truth about its indefensible actions that are driven by the toxic mix of an extremist ideology and hegemonic ambitions,” Pakistan’s Foreign Office spokesperson Mohammad Faisal said.

Faisal’s Indian counterpart Raveesh Kumar had said that Khan’s “open call for jihad” was not normal and had urged Pakistan and its leaders to behave like a “normal neighbouring country”. Kumar had referred to Khan’s statement last week describing the act of supporting Kashmiris as jihad, which, he said, he and his country were doing because they wanted to make Allah happy. Jihad is an Arabic word that literally means a struggle for a noble cause.

Faisal said that India was pretending to portray itself as a normal country. “The international community would like to ask as to what normal country cages 8 million people in an inhuman lockdown for over two months and deceives the world by claiming that ‘everything is fine’,” Faisal said in a statement. He was referring to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s remarks at the “Howdy Modi” event in the United States, where he had said everything in India is fine, repeating the sentence in multiple Indian languages.

“Similarly, what normal country provides space and political patronage to the perpetrators of mob lynchings by cow vigilantes and repugnant scheme like ‘ghar wapsi’ and ‘love jihad’,” Faisal said. The spokesperson also asked India to keep its “lectures on diplomacy and normality” to itself.

Meanwhile, Khan on Saturday cautioned residents of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir against crossing the Line of Control to help residents of Jammu and Kashmir. “I understand the anguish of the Kashmiris seeing their fellow Kashmiris in Jammu and Kashmir,” he tweeted. “Anyone crossing the Line of Control to provide humanitarian aid or support for Kashmiri struggle will play into the hands of the Indian narrative.” On multiple occasions, India has claimed to have foiled infiltration attempts from the Pakistani side.

Hundreds of PoK residents on Friday had travelled to Muzaffarabad in vehicles and bikes in a show of solidarity with Jammu and Kashmir residents, Dawn reported. Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front, a pro-Independence group that had called the rally, had also announced that they would cross the Line of Control.

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