Islamabad: A former Pakistan’s Foreign Office’s spokesperson on Monday claimed that ex-prime minister Nawaz Sharif was soft towards India and had barred the foreign ministry from speaking against India and death-row convict Kulbhushan Yadav.
Tasneem Aslam made these claims during an interview with a private news channel in which she said that the Sharif family wholeheartedly supported India. This support for India on their part was mostly dictated by the family’s various business interests with India.
According to a report in Dawn, the Foreign Office (FO) had been instructed not to use names of India and Kulbhushan [while delivering statements] in the Nawaz Sharif’s era. We had been ordered by [former premier] Nawaz Sharif to avoid statements against India.”
Tasneem, in the report, further said that ‘It has been Pakistan Government’s policy to meet the Hurriyat leadership whenever a leader from Islamabad visited New Delhi. Despite this when Nawaz Sharif went to India to participate in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s oath-taking ceremony in 2014, he did not meet the Kashmiri leaders’.
Tasneem Aslam had been the spokesperson for the Pakistan Foreign Office during the premiership of Nawaz Sharif.
She added that the foreign office was also given instructions to never talk about any Indian activities in the restive Balochistan, a region that has been waging an armed struggle for independence from Pakistan, by the Nawaz Sharif government.
Ms Aslam said that the policy followed by Nawaz Sharif towards India had not benefitted Pakistan in any way especially when there was no change in the stance from the Indian side towards Pakistan.
Ms Aslam had been a career diplomat who had served in missions in New Delhi, The Hague and Paris after joining her country’s Foreign Service in 1984 besides being ambassador to Italy and Morocco during 2007-2010 and in 2012, respectively.
