United Nations: India has lashed out at Pakistan for “weaponising” women’s rights issues for self-serving political gains in Jammu and Kashmir, saying it is ironical that a country where violations of women’s right to life in the name of “honour” go unpunished is making “baseless” statements about it in India.
First Secretary in India’s Permanent Mission to the UN Paulomi Tripathi during the UN General Assembly Third Committee session on “Advancement of Women” on Monday asserted that from the first woman President of the General Assembly Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit to women scientists at the Indian Space Research Organisation, Indian women have long served as inspiration for many.
“As we renew our collective resolve to continue to work towards the realisation of women’s empowerment and gender equality, there is no space for weaponising women’s rights issues through empty rhetoric for self-serving political gains. Today, one delegation has callously chosen to politicise this agenda by making unwarranted references to internal matters of my country,” she said at the Committee.
The Committee is one of the six in the UN General Assembly, deals with social, humanitarian affairs and human rights issues. Tripathi did not directly name Pakistan, but was responding to references made to Jammu and Kashmir by Islamabad’s outgoing envoy to the UN Maleeha Lodhi, who in her speech at the Committee earlier said the women in Jammu and Kashmir were suffering due to the communication blackout in the state.
Lodhi had alluded to a picture of a Kashmiri mother that appeared on the front page of The New York Times along with an article about how the mother lost her son, who was bitten by a snake, as she could not get medical help on time.
Without naming Pakistan, Tripathi said that the country covets the territory of others and camouflages its “vile intentions with fake concerns”. ‘It is ironical that a country, where violations of women’s right to life in the name of so called “honour” go unpunished, is making baseless statements about women’s rights in my country,” she said.
Tripathi said the international community still remembered that the “armed forces of this country” perpetrated dreadful sexual violence against women with impunity, in India’s immediate neighbourhood in 1971.
“We still hear accounts of these gruesome violations at the annual high level general debate. We do not wish to engage further on this issue with a delegation with such credibility,” Tripathi said, stressing that the precious time of the UNGA Committee be better utilised to deliberate on the agenda before it.
She said that despite significant progress made towards gender equality, women and girls around the world continue to face restrictions to access education, employment and political participation. Women are still married as children, trafficked into forced labour and sex slavery and every day more than 800 women die from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth, Tripathi said.