Vietnam’s Ambassador to India, Pham Sanh Chau
In significant remarks, Vietnam’s Ambassador to India, Pham Sanh Chau, said on Friday that normalcy was being restored in the Kashmir Valley and that people were largely happy with the current situation. The remarks by the Vietnamese envoy, one of the 15 foreign envoys on a two-day visit to Jammu and Kashmir, came on the final day of the tour that began on Thursday.
“We have interacted with different groups and feeling from those groups is that they are very happy with the current situation,” the Vietnamese Ambassador was quoted as saying by news agency Asian News International (ANI).
The Ambassador, however, added that the group of envoys were not a “fact-finding delegation" neither were they “judges of the international court,” ANI reported him as saying.
“We don't have that mandate, so we just came and observed and have assessment of our own. I see signs of happiness on faces of people when I talk to them,” he said.
Vietnam’s envoy was among 15 head of foreign missions who embarked on the visit, the other countries being the United States, South Korea, Bangladesh, Maldives, Fiji, Norway, Togo, Morocco, Argentina, Niger, Nigeria, Philippines, Guyana, Zambia and Peru.
Explaining the basis of selecting the cohort of foreign envoys, Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said at his weekly briefing on Thursday that the government had been receiving requests from several foreign missions who had wanted to visit J&K following the abrogation of Article 370 in August.
“The objective of the visit was for the envoys to see firsthand, the efforts which have been made by the government to normalize the situation and also basically to see how things have progressed and how the normalcy has been restored to a large extent since the developments related to Article 370 in August and there have been several steps which have been taken by local administration towards that objective,” Kumar said.
Also watch: Normalcy returning in Jammu and Kashmir, say civil society member after meeting foreign envoys
