New Delhi:

A day after China stopped a joint India-US bid on the UN to put sanctions on Abdul Rauf Asghar, the Jaish-e-Mohammed’s second-in-command, India’s overseas ministry stated it regrets the “hold” and can maintain searching for motion.  

“India will continue pursuing its principled position of bringing these terrorists to justice, including through the UNSC 1267 Sanctions Regime,” stated Arindam Bagchi, the External Affairs Ministry spokesperson. “We note with regret that a ‘technical hold’ has been placed on the listing proposal,” he added.

“It is unfortunate that when it comes to our collective battle against terrorism, the international community has been unable to speak in one common voice,” he additional stated.  

Abdul Rauf Asghar is concerned within the planning and execution of quite a few terror assaults, in response to Indian authorities. These embody hijacking of Indian Airlines plane IC814 (1999) – when India needed to launch his elder brother Masood Azhar to get the hostages again from Afghanistan – in addition to the assault on the Indian Parliament (2001) and on the Indian Air Force base in Pathankot (2016).

China, a everlasting member of the UN Security Council, positioned the technical maintain saying it wanted extra time to check the bid.  

Two months in the past, China positioned an analogous maintain towards the itemizing of Lashkar-e-Taiba deputy chief Abdul Rehman Makki. He is accused of elevating funds, recruiting and radicalising youths to resort to violence and planning assaults in India, together with the Mumbai terror assaults in 2008.  

In the previous, China had positioned a technical maintain 4 instances over a decade for related itemizing of his brother, Masood Azhar. Finally, the sanctioning occurred after the Pulwama terror assault in 2019.  

Syed Akbaruddin, who was India’s ambassador to the UN when Masood Azhar was sanctioned, says putting a technical maintain is an outdated tactic that China makes use of.

“It’s a stalling tactic using procedures of sanctions committee,” Mr Akbaruddin, Dean of Kautilya School of Public Policy, informed NDTV.

“There are ways to overcome it. It’s only a matter of our intention to pursue this to its logical conclusion. They can stall, they can duck, but they can’t escape” he added.  

Government sources stated such politically motivated actions by China, in practically each itemizing case of a Pakistan-based terrorist, undermine all the sanctity of the working strategies of the UNSC Sanctions Committees. They additionally identified that it exposes China’s “double speak and double standards” relating to the worldwide neighborhood’s shared battle towards terrorism.