Calling for “serious and sincere talks” on “burning points like Kashmir” with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said that Islamabad has learned its lesson after three wars with India and now wants to establish peaceful ties with the neighbor.
In an interview with Dubai-based Al Arabiya TV, Shehbaz Sharif said: “My message to the Indian leadership and Prime Minister Modi is that let’s sit down on the table and have serious and sincere talks to resolve our burning points like Kashmir. It is up to us to live peacefully and make progress or quarrel with each other and waste time and resources.”
Sharif said that three wars with India have resulted in nothing but poverty, misery and unemployment to the people.
“We have learnt our lesson, and we want to live in peace with India, provided we are able to resolve our genuine problems,” Sharif said in the interview aired on Monday.
Shehbaz Sharif said that neither India nor Pakistan can change their geographical location and they are neighbors forever, even if not by choice and its up to New Delhi and Islamabad to either learn to live peacefully and progress or quarrel and waste time and resources.
On the subject of Kashmir, Sharif said that Pakistan wants peace but “what is happening in Kashmir should be stopped.”
In November 2022, India had hit out at Pakistan for raking up the Kashmir issue during a United Nations debate terming it a “desperate attempt to peddle falsehoods”.
As we meet today to discuss UNSC reforms, a representative of Pakistan has yet again made unwarranted references to Jammu and Kashmir. Jammu and Kashmir remains an integral and inalienable part of India irrespective of what Pakistan’s representative believes,” Pratik Mathur, Permanent Mission of India to UN, had said in the right to reply during the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) meet on UN Security Council.
Adding “Pakistan’s desperate attempts to peddle falsehoods and a bad habit of abusing the sanctity of multilateral forums deserves collective contempt and perhaps sympathies as well.”
Pakistan Foreign Affairs Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari had spoken about alleged human rights violations in Jammu and Kashmir.
Meanwhile, in the Al Arabiya interview, Sharif hoped that engineers, doctors, and skilled labourers in India and Pakistan could be utilized as assets to further prosperity and peace in both nations.
“Pakistan does not want to waste resources on bombs and ammunition. We are nuclear powers, armed to the teeth, and if God forbids, a war breaks out, who will live to tell what happened?” the Pakistani leader asked.