Deliberately misrepresenting United Nations reports and diplomatic statements for your own geopolitical benefit is a contemptible move but it is a tactic that India is no stranger to. Having stirred up conflict with nearly all of its neighbours, India has time and time again taken advantage of the diplomacy of international organisations by misinterpreting and sometimes outright falsifying their monitoring reports or evaluations to evade responsibility or instigate further tensions. India has done this repeatedly with Pakistan, baselessly throwing around terrorism allegations just for its own regional advantage, and falsely claiming that international consensus is with them.

Unfortunately for India, its pretensions could not be further from the truth. Its recent misstep, of untruthfully claiming that a UNSC monitoring report on Afghanistan stated that there were militant “safe havens” in Pakistan, is patently false, as Pakistan’s Foreign Office has pointed out. There was absolutely no reference to any safe havens in Pakistan in the report; rather the implications from the MT report were more incriminating for India than they were for Pakistan, due to its mention of the banned Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), an organisation which India has supported in the past.

India’s distortion of a UNSC report on terrorism in Afghanistan, an issue of utmost importance to the global community, reflects that it is not acting in good faith, and its inclusion does more damage than good. India’s contributions to the Afghanistan peace process should be taken with a pinch of salt, considering it is ready to distort reality for its own political gains. This detail about TTP’s functioning should not be over- looked by the international community – there are several Indian terror outfits that ought to be banned, which India is using to disintegrate any peaceful resolution of the conflict in Afghanistan, and this recent provocation just further reveals India’s bad-faith intentions.