Minister of State for External Affairs of India Shri Mobashar Jawed Akbar, at Tashkent Conference on Afghanistan, noted that prosperity is impossible without peace and the greatest contemporary threat to peace is terrorism. “We seek the peace of the famed Afghan garden and glen, not the dead peace of a graveyard. We cannot lose sight of the horizon during the travails of the journey”, – said the Minister of State.
Minister of State for External Affairs of India emphasized that there can be neither solution nor resolution without principled commitment to law, to democracy as the basis of order and to human rights. At the centre of human rights is gender emancipation: the right of women to equality, education, social assertion and full participation in the economic and political life of Afghanistan. These rights are the standard bearers of the 21st century. Without them the negotiating table will be an arid retreat towards regression rather than a platform for progress.
Shri Mobashar Jawed Akbar also noted that there is a common misapprehension that Afghanistan has suffered social stagnation since 2001 because of conflict. “This is not true. We must applaud the courage of Afghan leaders and people who have nurtured change and advance in the most difficult circumstances”, – the Minister of State said. He noted that India stands committed to any process which can help Afghanistan emerge as a united, peaceful, secure, stable, inclusive and economically vibrant nation, with guaranteed gender and human rights.
Minister of State for External Affairs of India emphasized the warning of the late President Islam Karimov, a founding father of modern Uzbekistan, of the deep, insidious threat to peace and pluralism from terrorism, in 2010 at the UN General Assembly. In 2017, His Excellency President Shavkat Mirziyoyev has said unequivocally that security is “indivisible”: ours, rather than mine or yours. Within these bookends we can take this process forward.
