India can not become a regional power until resolving its regional disputes

ISLAMABAD, May 7 (APP):Ambassador (R) Inam-ul-Haque Monday said India pretended to be an emerging regional power but it could not attain the status until it sorted out its disputes with regional countries especially the issue of Indian occupied Kashmir.
He was chairing an International Seminar on “India: A Pretentious Regional Power,” organized by the Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad (ISSI) here at a local hotel.
Federal Minister of Defense, Engineer Khurram Dastgir Khan was the Chief Guest on the occasion while other speakers included Dr. Ejaz Akram, Advisor to President National Defense University (NDU) & former Associate Professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Dr. habil. Christian Wagner, Head of Research Division Asia at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP); Ms. Laura Schuurmans, independent writer and researcher based in Jakarta; Dr. Muhammad Mujeeb Afzal, Assistant Professor at the Quaid-i-Azam University (QAU) and Mohammad Waqas Sajjad, Senior Research Fellow at ISSI.
Engineer Dastgir Khan said hat India as well as Pakistan should seriously tackle non-traditional security threats that affect people’s lives and livelihoods, such as water insecurity, climate change etc.
“Understanding India as a pretentious regional power is important for both Pakistan, as well as for the rest of the world – particularly for the former so as to ensure it is prepared to meet any challenge militarily,” he added. .
Ambassador Inam ul Huq said values of a country depicted from how it treated its minorities and India had failed on that account.
He said Pakistan had, for several decades, been raising the issue of human rights abuses in Indian Occupied Kashmir, adding it was only now that the international community was beginning to notice the violence committed by Indian state agencies.
The speakers also analysed the growing economic insecurity and issues of governance in India.
Dr. Ejaz Akram said that though India had projected itself as rising power but it was still reflective of a society facing multiple problems where the highest authorities were directly or indirectly complicit in gross violation of human rights.
Dr. Christian Wagner said while India had continued to invest in hard power and its military needed to acquire global and regional power status, it should make efforts to lift the millions of its people from the high poverty levels they were enmeshed in.
In his concluding remarks Chairman ISSI, Ambassador Khalid Mahmood said that the idea of the rising Indian economy could no longer be used to sustain the argument of India as a regional power.
He said that though India did have the requisites of becoming a major power, as yet it did not have the pre-requisites of becoming that major power.
The seminar was attended by a large number of academia, bureaucrats, university students and media representatives.