New Delhi: Pakistan summoned the senior-most diplomat in the US embassy to hand over a protest note over the India-US joint statement that had called on Islamabad to take action on terror groups based on its territory.
The Pakistan foreign office summoned the US deputy chief of mission Andrew Schofer and handed over a demarche over the “unwarranted, one-sided and misleading references to it in the joint statement” were conveyed to him.
“It was stressed that the United States should refrain from issuing statements that may be construed as an encouragement of India’s baseless and politically motivated narrative against Pakistan”, the FO statement said.
The India-US joint statement issued after the talks between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Joe Biden noted that they “strongly condemned cross-border terrorism, the use of terrorist proxies and called on Pakistan to take immediate action to ensure that no territory under its control is used for launching terrorist attacks,” the statement said.
The Pakistan foreign office claimed that counter-terrorism cooperation between Pakistan and the United States was progressing well, but added that an enabling environment centred around “trust and understanding” was imperative to further solidify Pakistan-US ties.
Earlier on Sunday, former foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi had criticised the Shehbaz Sharif government’s lack of response on the joint statement issued by the United States and India which called on Pakistan to crack down on extremists that target New Delhi.
“This was a bilateral visit, it is his right. They met [and] they had a discussion. But the joint communique issued after the meeting — reading that joint communique as a former foreign minister of Pakistan — caused me great pain,” Qureshi said on Sunday.
After the joint statement was issued on Friday, the Foreign Office (FO) had termed the statement “misleading and unwarranted”, saying that the “reference is contrary to diplomatic norms and has political overtones”.
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