No country with Pakistan on Kashmir issue: India Defence Minister

Pakistan has no locus standi on Kashmir and no country is backing it on the "current issue", India's Defence Minister Rajnath Singh said today.

Addressing an event in Leh, the main city of Ladakh which has been bifurcated from Kashmir Valley on August 5, Singh asked how can India talk to Pakistan when it keeps trying to destabilise India using terror.

India wants to have good neighbourly relationship with Pakistan, but it should first stop exporting terror to India, Singh said.

Asserting that Pakistan has no locus standi on Kashmir, he said "I want to ask Pakistan when had Kashmir belonged to it? Kashmir was always part of India."

He said US Defense Secretary Mark Esper had, during a telephonic conversation recently, told him that abrogation of Article 370 was an internal matter of India.

Singh's remarks came amid Pakistan's desperate efforts to internationalise India's move to abrogate the Constitution's Article 370 that had given a special status to Jammu and Kashmir for seventy years and split Kashmir and Ladakh in separate federally-ruled territories.