NEW YORK: Decrying the Indian disinformation campaign targeting Islamabad, a Pakistan diplomat on Tuesday drew the United Nations Human Rights Council’s (UNHRC) attention to New Delhi’s failure to respond to the gross rights violations in occupied Kashmir evoking international condemnation.
1/6: 🇵🇰 Right of Reply against 🇮🇳 today at #HRC46:
As 🇵🇰 highlights 🇮🇳’s well-documented atrocities in #IIOJK, #HRC has yet to hear response from 🇮🇳- a country that claims to be world’s largest democracy but has shamelessly violated every human rights principle, norms and laws. pic.twitter.com/XaRCHp80fp— Permanent Mission of Pakistan to UN, Geneva (@PakUN_Geneva) March 2, 2021
“India has failed and will continue to fail in hiding its brutal repression of the Kashmiri people behind the self-serving smokescreen of terrorism,” Junaid Suleman, second secretary, told the forum exercising his right of reply after an Indian representative had attempted to malign Pakistan.
“As Pakistan highlights India’s atrocities in Occupied Jammu & Kashmir, which have been well-documented by the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, UN mandate holders (rights experts) and international NGOs, the Council has yet to hear any response from India — a country that claims to be the world’s largest democracy but has shamelessly violated every human rights principle, norms and laws,” said Suleman.
The Indian representative, Pawan Badhe, had reacted to Pakistan Ambassador Khalil Hashmi’s speech in which the envoy had urged the UN rights chief to conduct an impartial investigation into Indian violations of human rights in the disputed region.
Ambassador Hashmi had also made similar demands when he spoke on behalf of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).
Responding to Indian terrorism claims, Suleman said that New Delhi’s “compulsive obsession with Pakistan is neither new nor surprising.”
He pointed out that the Indian government had deployed tools of deflection, deception, and disinformation as evident from the EU DisinInfo Lab’s two investigative reports and the “infamous Arnab Goswami saga.”
At the same time, he said Pakistan was not the only target of the Indian disinformation network, citing the shuttering of Amnesty International’s office last year and vicious attacks on the UN Human Rights machinery.
“Yet,” Suleman said, “India’s façade of a practicing democracy stands exposed today […] its representative can no longer mask the facts that it is in India only where dissent is sedition; where human rights activists are branded as terrorists; and where peaceful protests are treated as part of an imaginary global conspiracy against a failing state.”
“From forced conversion to arbitrary denial of citizenship rights, and from state-sanctioned communal violence to apartheid policies, the BJP-RSS regime has now codified the choice between extermination or total submission for India’s minorities.
Under the leadership of Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, and [Uttar Pradesh] Chief Minister Yogi Adiyanath, the Indian state machinery has launched anti-Muslim campaigns such as ‘Love Jihad’, ‘Land Jihad’, incited public lynching and violence, and legislated mass ostracisation under the patently discriminatory citizenship law.”
“With a documented history of pogroms in Gujarat, Muzaffarnagar, Malegnon, and most recently in Delhi, many independent observers have been obliged to conclude that in India, a cow is safer than an Indian Muslim,” he observed.
“No amount of empty rhetoric and dubious grandstanding can alter these hard facts,” Suleman said.
