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.
