United Nations, Dec 16: In a strong and stinging rebuttal to Pakistan at the United Nations Security Council Open Debate, India served a notice to Pakistan that it will not tolerate Islamabad’s terrorism and will counter it “with all its might”.

“Let me be clear: India will counter Pakistan-sponsored terrorism in all its forms and manifestations with all its might,” India’s Permanent Representative P. Harish said sternly on Monday (local time).

Reacting to Pakistan’s Permanent Representative Asim Iftikhar Ahmad taking a huge detour from the topic of Security Council debate, ‘Leadership for Peace’, to talk about the Indus Water Treaty, Harish said it “will be held in abeyance until Pakistan, which is a global epi-centre of terror, credibly and irrevocably ends its support for cross-border and all other forms of terrorism”.

India put the treaty on hold because of Pakistan’s terrorism and wars that killed tens of thousands of Indians, he said.

“India had entered into the Indus Waters Treaty, 65 years ago, in good faith, in a spirit of goodwill and friendship,” he said. “Throughout these six and a half decades, Pakistan has violated the spirit of the Treaty by inflicting three wars and thousands of terror attacks on India”.

The Pahalgam terror attack in April, during which Pakistan-sponsored terrorists carried out “religion-based targeted killings of 26 innocent civilians”, was the most recent.

The attack in which Hindus and a Christian were slaughtered was the last straw, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that he was suspending the 1960 treaty signed by then-Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru for sharing river waters with Pakistan.

Harish ridiculed Pakistan for obsessively bringing up issues extraneous to topics under discussion at the UN.

Akram’s “unwarranted reference to Jammu and Kashmir in today’s open debate attests to its obsessive focus on harming India and its people,” he said.

“A serving non-permanent Security Council Member that chooses to further this obsession in all meetings and platforms of the UN in pursuit of its divisive agenda cannot be expected to fulfil its designated responsibilities and obligations,” he added.

Harish questioned Pakistan’s commitment to democracy, pointing to the recent 27th Amendment to its Constitution that establishes the supremacy of the military over the “will of the people”.

“Pakistan, of course, has a unique way of respecting the will of its people — by jailing a Prime Minister, by banning the ruling political party and by letting its armed forces engineer a constitutional coup through the 27th amendment and giving life-time immunity to its Chief of Defence Forces (CDF),” he said.

Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan, who ran afoul of the military overlords, is languishing in prison, and his party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), has been banned.

The 27th Amendment, adopted last month, gives Field Marshal Asim Munir a new constitutional position of CDF with lifetime immunity from prosecution and guarantees a term till 2030, empowering him to oversee the next general election.

While Harish had to respond to Pakistan’s insinuations, the focus of his speech was on the leadership of the UN, in which the Security Council is meant to play a prime role, but has often failed.

“The quality and focus of the leadership displayed by members of the Council,” he said, “represents the most important aspect impinging on maintenance of international peace and security”.

For this, a reform of the Security Council “to make it fit-for-purpose to tackle contemporary challenges is an urgent global imperative”.

He criticised the Inter-Governmental Negotiations process for reform as “barren and bereft of productive outcomes” and said it must “move towards time-bound text-based negotiations at the earliest”.

Reform should “enhance representation from under-represented and unrepresented geographies in tune with today’s realities, in both the permanent and elected categories of membership,” he said.

The top leader of the UN, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, completes his term at the end of next year.

The election of his successor should be held with “greater transparency”, Harish said.

“The new Secretary General must embody the aspirations of the overwhelming majority of humanity, who are from developing countries of the Global South,” he said.

Harish questioned the current system of allocating top posts in the UN system on a “division of spoils” basis that gives some countries — mainly the permanent members of the Security Council — a monopoly over certain positions.

“Leadership by definition must be inclusive for it to be representative, legitimate, and effective,” he said.