India pushed back against Pakistan's remarks on the rule of law at the United Nations, contending that Islamabad was not positioned to raise such concerns given the extent of military authority over governance in that country.
India exercised its Right of Reply at the UN General Assembly's Sixth Committee on Friday, responding to remarks by Pakistan during a session on the rule of law. R. Mythili, Counsellor at India's Permanent Mission to the UN, stated that a country whose military holds authority beyond the reach of its own courts is not well-placed to advocate for rule-of-law principles in that forum. She also characterised Pakistan's 26th Constitutional Amendment as a measure that has undermined judicial independence.
Passage of the 26th Constitutional Amendment opened the door to reshaping how Pakistan's judiciary is organised and how it operates day to day. Critics have argued that the measure undermines both the rule of law and the protections afforded to human rights.
Mythili raised the case of former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan's detention, contending that a political environment in which no elected administration has been allowed to serve out its full term, an opposition figure remains imprisoned without adequate legal basis and cut off from medical attention in contravention of the country's own Supreme Court orders, and a party with broad popular backing faces obstacles to standing in elections — while civilians are subjected to military tribunals, judicial independence is constrained, and civil liberties are restricted — cannot sustain any credible claim to rule-of-law governance. She called on her Pakistani counterpart to act in accordance with the wishes of the population.
Responding to Pakistan's characterisation of India's conduct, Mythili put forward a counter-position in a subsequent statement — that Pakistan's own record on minority rights and press freedom warranted scrutiny before such charges could be levelled. She described Pakistan's allegations about the treatment of religious minorities in India as an attempt to shift attention away from its own record on minority communities, noting that such groups had made up a declining share of Pakistan's population throughout the country's history.
Mythili drew attention to Pakistan's Foreign Media Facilitation Guidelines — a framework under which journalists operating outside Islamabad, Lahore, and Karachi are required to obtain a no-objection certificate before taking on assignments — and posed the question of what press freedom could realistically look like under such conditions. She also argued that those who hold governing authority carry an obligation under the rule of law toward the populations they administer, a commitment she contended Pakistan has not consistently honoured.
Mythili argued that any fixation on the other country flowed in a single direction — outward from Pakistan toward India, rather than the other way around. She also stood by Operation Sindoor — the military action India carried out in May 2025 against what it described as terror infrastructure in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, undertaken in response to the Pahalgam attack — characterising it as a response that was calibrated, proportionate, and narrowly directed at a terror incident. She noted that if adversaries considered bombed airfields and destroyed hangars to constitute a victory, they were at liberty to regard it as such.
Mythili contended that Pakistani delegates were repeating a list of allegations against India that she viewed as unsubstantiated, while leaving unaddressed the domestic obligations those representatives had pledged to their own people — pledges she believed had never been made in good faith.
