Pakistan asks India to combat ‘dangerous’ Islamophobia trend

GENEVA: Pakistan has told the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) about India’s “abysmal” treatment of religious minorities, with a forceful call for New Delhi to reverse the “dangerous” Islamophobic trend in the South Asian country, as also advocated by UN human rights experts.

“Can the representative of India justify the recent incident where a BJP leader openly threatened to slaughter 200,000 Muslims,” Pakistani delegate Rabia Ijaz asked India’s representative who earlier accused Pakistan of mistreating its minorities, while also alleging that it was involved in terrorism.

“We witnessed India’s leadership’s unabashed use of anti-Muslim rhetoric for political gain, including their Prime Minister (Narendra Modi) calling Muslims ‘infiltrators’ during one of his (recent) campaign speeches. Moreover, Hindu priests have openly called for genocide of Muslim minorities in India,” Ijaz, a second secretary in the Pakistan Mission to the UN said.

India’s representative, Kajal Bhat, a counsellor in the Indian Mission to the UN, made the allegations in response to Pakistan’s UN Ambassador Munir Akram’s sharp speech on Monday in which the Pakistani envoy, apart from New Delhi’s atrocities in Jammu and Kashmir, also highlighted the grave human rights abuses of Muslim’s in India.

“Muslims face systematic, officially sanctioned, discrimination, violence and oppression,” Ambassador Akram said. “The law-enforcement and judicial machinery was complicit in this oppression as lynching of Muslims by cow vigilantes and RSS thugs goes unpunished”, the ambassador said.

Rabia Ijaz, the Pakistani delegate, reacting to the allegations by the Indian representative, said, “Our leadership swiftly intervenes, condemns the acts (involving minorities), and ensures swift justice for the perpetrators.”

In sharp stark contrast, she said, India’s leadership was bent on escalating communal tensions, pointing out that India stands out where the government not only endorses but is complicit in these serious crimes.

“There is a glaring lack of political will to curb these atrocities in India, unlike Pakistan’s unequivocal stance in similar circumstances,” the Pakistani delegate remarked, noting that UN human rights experts issued a statement in March stating, “We are alarmed by continuing reports of attacks on religious, racial and ethnic minorities, on women and girls on intersecting grounds, and on civil society, including human rights defenders and the media in India,”

“Instead of making vitriolic remarks and fabricating information with no evidence against my country, they (Indians) should better address the concerns being consistently raised by the UN experts and reverse the dangerous Islamophobic trend in their country,” she said.

About the Indian representative’s reference to the 1971 events, Ms Ijaz said those were not a question of genocide but of India’s foreign aggression and attack on national sovereignty and territorial integrity of Pakistan.

As regards terrorism, the Pakistani delegate said it was ironic for India that uses terrorism as an instrument of State policy against its neighbours to point fingers at others when it is itself a state sponsor of terrorism, running a global franchise of assassination campaigns and had even abused sanctions regimes in the UN Security Council to prevent the listing of its nationals involved in various terrorist activities.

About India claim of Kashmir as its integral part, Ms Ijaz said that New Delhi knows that its illegal annexation (in August 2019) would never be accepted by the occupied people of Jammu and Kashmir.

“Jammu & Kashmir dispute is neither a constitutional nor an internal matter of India,” she said, adding, “It has always been and continues to remain an internationally recognized dispute under relevant Security Council resolutions. It cannot be wished away by India through legal acrobatics.”

In conclusion, the Pakistani delegate urged the international community to work towards alleviating the suffering of the people of Jammu & Kashmir by granting them their right of self-determination as enshrined by the UN Charter as well as numerous UNSC resolutions.