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Former Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Khar has accused India of being a "belligerent" and "hegemonic" state while calling on the US to reassess its strategic approach to South Asia and stop viewing Pakistan solely through the prism of its relationship with New Delhi.
Speaking to GZERO Media's Ian Bremmer on the recent escalation between the two nuclear-armed nations, Khar criticised India for setting "new norms" by conducting strikes on Pakistan following the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack, noting that terrorism was "common" not just in South Asia but around the world. "India, a very large, what I call a belligerent country, decides that if there is a security lapse in their own territory or if something happens - terrorism is kind of common in South Asia - now the rest of the world also has the right to launch missile strikes into another country, which also happens to be a nuclear state, and not worry about the repercussions and claim to the world that we have set new norms," she said during an interview with Bremmer released on the media outlet's youtube channel on Saturday. Khar also expressed concern over Washington's strategic tilt towards India at the expense of its relationship with Pakistan, arguing that Islamabad should be recognised for its independent contributions. "I think the United States of America started viewing Pakistan exclusively from the Indian lens. ... I think there is a reality check in the United States of America about how Pakistan must not be viewed from the Indian lens, which is exceptionally belligerent towards Pakistan..." She also noted that Pakistan still holds "relevance" to the US. Khar also strongly defended Pakistan's ties with China, dismissing concerns raised in Western discourse and on broader Beijing-Islamabad cooperation. She criticised the current global narrative portraying China as a threat, stating that Pakistan continues to see China as a "force of stability" and a provider of economic development, especially in a region where traditional international lenders have scaled back infrastructure investment. "In the last 10 years, the world has started noticing Pakistan and China's strong strategic ties. Pakistan and China have had historical ties, which have been strategic in nature and very, very deep for many decades... Pakistan and China have had these relations, whereas at the same time, Pakistan has had very strong relations with the US all of this time throughout those decades, but the world wasn't noticing China as a competitor... Suddenly, where China is feeling and seeming like a threat to the world because of its emerging economic power, technological power, and perhaps military power, which is nowhere compared to the US, we view China in a very different way," she stated. "Within Pakistan and within the broader region, China has been a force of stability and a force of economics, so to be able to give the type of economic goods and infrastructure which were no longer available from the World Bank or the Asian Development Bank, China came in and wanted to do it in a really big way," she added. (ANI)
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