Pakistan tells India to “set its own house in order” on minority rights

Pakistan on Saturday categorically rejecting the “completely unwarranted assertions” by the Indian Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) regarding the Hindu temple incident in Karak, asked India to focus on its persistent violations of minority rights.

“Given these incontrovertible facts, the Indian Government would be well advised to set its own house in order rather than feigning concern for minority rights elsewhere,” the foreign office said in a statement.

The foreign office said this was not the first time the Indian Government had tried to feign concern for minority rights elsewhere while being the “most egregious and persistent violator of minority rights itself”.

The statement mentioned that the RSS-BJP regime’s record was replete with instances of gross and systemic violations of the rights of minorities, in particular Muslims.

It mentioned in this regard the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) to National Register of Citizens (NRC), from the Gujarat massacre of 2002 to the Delhi pogrom of 2020, from the reprehensible demolition of BabriMosque in 1992 to the despicable acquittal of all the accused by Indian court in 2020 and from blaming Muslims for spreading Coronavirus to banning of inter-faith marriages.

The foreign office stressed that India was involved in cow vigilantism, mob lynchings besides terming the Muslims of West Bengal ‘termites’ and threatening to ‘throw them into the Bay of Bengal’.

Also, it pointed out that other illegal actions included extra-judicial killings of innocent Kashmiris and blatant attempts to turn Muslims into a minority in Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu & Kashmir (IIOJK) through distribution of ‘fake domicile certificate’.

“As a perennial purveyor of state-sponsored discrimination against its minorities, India is in no position to pontificate on the issue of minority rights elsewhere,” the statement added.

The foreign office said the clear difference between India and Pakistan in respect of minority rights could be gauged from the fact that the accused in the Karak incident were immediately arrested, orders were issued for repair of the temple, the highest level of judiciary took immediate notice, and senior political leadership condemned the incident.

It said that whereas in India, the blatant acts of discrimination against Muslims and other minorities take place with state complicity.

“The Indian leadership is yet to condemn the perpetrators of the Delhi massacre in February 2020, let alone bring those criminals to justice,” the FO statement said.