The Foreign Office (FO) on Thursday rejected recent remarks made by India’s foreign minister on Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) as “baseless claims” while asking his country to vacate occupied areas of the region.
The statement comes a day after India’s External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, referring to AJK, said the Kashmir dispute would be solved after the “return of the stolen part of Kashmir which is under illegal Pakistani occupation”.
Speaking during a session at the Chatham House think-tank in London on Wednesday, Jaishankar had said: “I think the path we are waiting for is the return of the stolen part of Kashmir, which is under illegal Pakistani occupation. When that’s done, I assure you, Kashmir [issue is] solved.”
The comments came in response to a query by a journalist — who said India was occupying Kashmir illegally — about the possibility of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking US President Donald Trump’s involvement to solve the dispute.
“I think we have done a good job solving most of [the problem],” Jaishankar said, insisting that the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019 and the polls in the region in October 2024 were part of that.
