NEW DELHI: India on Tuesday strongly condemned China’s move to block Lashkar-e-Taiba’s Sajid Mir from being designated as a “global terrorist” by the United Nations.
Issuing a strongly-worded statement at the UN headquarters in New York, joint secretary (UN political at external affairs ministry) Prakash Gupta said that if efforts to ban terrorists fail due to “petty geopolitical interests”, then “we really do not have the genuine political will to sincerely fight this challenge of terrorism”.
Gupta added that Mir, the mastermind of the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, was listed as a proscribed terrorist under the laws of India and the US and of several other countries.
“But when the proposal for listing Sajid Mir did not get through the Global Listings of the UN Security Council Sanctions Regime”, despite several member states cosponsoring it, “we have righteous reasons to believe that something is genuinely wrong with the global counter terrorism architecture”.
Gupta said this while addressing a high-level conference on counter-terrorism after China blocked India and US proposal on Mir.
The session he was addressing was on “Strengthening Capacity Building Programmes: Making them Fit for Purpose to Meet Resilience Gaps”.
The Indian diplomat’s comments came just hours before Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s address at the UN.
During the session, Gupta also played an audio file recorded during the 2008 terror attacks on Mumbai and referring to the voice, he said, “This is Sajid Mir, directing the terrorists on phone to hunt down foreigners at the Taj hotel and kill them indiscriminately.”
He said that even 15 years after the Mumbai terror attacks, its masterminds have not been brought to justice.
“Some of them continue to roam scot-free with full state hospitality,” Gupta said.
“So the first and most critical gap we feel addressing is, avoiding double standards and this self-defeating justification of good terrorists vs bad terrorists. A terror act is a terror act, period, any justification being used should not be countenanced upon by anybody,” he added.
The diplomat also told the gathering what Modi had said last year, “We consider that a single attack is one too many and even a single life lost is one too many. So we will not rest till terrorism is uprooted.”
“India remains resolutely firm in walking the talk, when it comes to plugging the resilience gaps in countering terrorism,” Gupta concluded.
Sajid Mir, one of India’s most-wanted terrorists, is being hunted for his involvement in the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai that took place on November 26 that year.
He was the chief planner of the attacks, directing preparations and reconnaissance, and was one of the Pakistan-based controllers during the attacks, India maintains.
In recent times, China has blocked several bids to designate terrorists based in Pakistan.
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