‘Regressive’: Without naming Pak, Modi slams Imran’s crude rhetoric

TIL Desk/World/UN/ Without once naming Pakistan, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday ripped his Pakistan counterpart Imran Khan’s harsh rhetoric targeting India by slamming “countries with regressive thinking that are using terrorism as a political tool”.

Modi was speaking at the United Nations General Assembly in New York and his address came a day after Khan’s litany. During a Friday address, Khan had framed Pakistan as a victim ‘wrongfully trapped between American and global double standards’.

“For the current situation in Afghanistan, for some reason, Pakistan has been blamed for the turn of events by politicians in the US and some politicians in Europe,” Khan said, adding: “From this platform, I want them all to know, the country that suffered the most, apart from Afghanistan, was Pakistan when we joined the US war on terror after 9/11.”

Khan’s toughest words were reserved for India. India, in its right of reply on Friday, hit back. “This is the country which is an arsonist disguising itself as a firefighter,” Sneha Dubey, a first secretary in India’s UN Mission, said on Friday. “Pakistan nurtures terrorists in their backyard in the hope that they will only harm their neighbours. Our region, and in fact the entire world, has suffered because of their policies,” she said.