UNITED NATIONS: Pakistan has rejected India’s allegation of Islamabad’s involvement in acts of terrorism, citing instances of New Delhi’s sponsorship of militancy and aggression against its neighbours which it said makes the nuclear nation the “principle perpetrator, sponsor, financier and abettor” of terrorism in South Asian region.
“The myth of terrorism against Pakistan, created and propagated by India, cannot and will not hide the stark reality that people of Pakistan, the occupied Jammu and Kashmir and its own minorities are victims of its state-sponsored terrorism,” Saima Saleem, a counsellor at Pakistan’s Mission to the United Nations, told the General Assembly late on Friday.
Saleem was exercising her right of response to Mijito Vinito, an Indian diplomat, who accused Pakistan of sponsoring cross-border terrorism and making “untenable territorial claims against neighbours” — a thinly-veiled reference to the disputed region of Kashmir.
Vinito made her claim in response to Shehbaz Sharif’s speech to the 193-member bloc in which the prime minister drew the world community’s attention to New Delhi’s grave rights violations in occupied Kashmir, and called for resolving the UN-recognised dispute in accordance with Security Council resolutions.
In her remarks, Saleem said India has “sponsored and perpetrated terrorism and aggression against all its neighbours” by nurturing terrorist groups, and destabilising and blockading neighbours to do its strategic bidding.
In Pakistan, she said, India was funding and supporting terrorist groups like the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) who have killed thousands of innocent people in terrorist attacks.
“Since the Hindutva inspired RSS-BJP government’s unilateral and illegal actions on August 5, 2019, termed as ‘Final Solution’ (a Nazi plan for the genocide of Jews during World War II), India’s 900,000 occupation forces in occupied Kashmir — the ‘densest’ occupation in history — have escalated their oppression of 8 million Kashmiri men, women and children in the world’s largest ‘open-air prison’,” she said.
She accused India of extra-judicial killings in staged encounters; enforced disappearances of 15,000 youth; incarceration of the entire pro-freedom leadership; bringing about demographic change by issuing millions of domicile certificates to non-Kashmiris; gerrymandering of electoral boundaries for reducing Muslim representation; curbing religious freedom and media and internet blackout.”
Since 1989, India has committed over 0.1 million extra-judicial killings, around 162,000 cases of arbitrary arrests and torture, over 25,000 pellet gun injuries, 11,250 cases of rape and gang rape, and 8,652 unmarked mass graves, attesting to the genocide which is being committed in occupied Kashmir.
“Yet, we fear that these discoveries of Indian crimes are but the tip of the iceberg,” Saleem said.
“If India has nothing to hide, it must grant access to Occupied Jammu and Kashmir to human rights mechanisms, accept a UN Commission of Inquiry and agree to implement the Security Council resolutions,” she said.
Highlighting India’s reign of terror against its minorities, the diplomat said Islamophobia has penetrated into the very foundations of the Indian state, where 200 million defenceless Muslims are lynched by groups of cow vigilantes and killed in pogroms led by Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) “brown-short thugs”.
Noting that public calls for the desecration of mosques are on the state’s agenda, she said rich Muslim culture and heritage are being destroyed and history is being rewritten.
The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 — ostensibly providing a pathway to Indian citizenship for persecuted religious minorities from neighbouring nations — aims to purge India of its Muslim minority, she said.
Saleem further pointed out that Hijab is banned, anti-Muslim social media trolls of “Corona Jihad” rule the internet, and the ruling leaders call Muslims “termites” and the “green virus”.
Also, houses and shops of Muslims are being bulldozed, and derogatory remarks against the prophet are being made by the top leadership of the RSS-BJP dispensation as a matter of state policy to hurt the feelings and sentiments of not only Indian Muslims but also of Muslims across the world.
“Other minorities in India, including Christians, Sikhs and Dalits, also face persecution and churches and gurdwaras are torched by Hindu fundamentalists,” Saleem said.
“Let me emphasise that no quantum of the brutality of Indian occupation forces can break the will, perseverance and courage of the Kashmiris to demand their inalienable right to self-determination in accordance with Security Council resolutions.
“Like Martin Luther King, the Kashmiris also have a ‘dream’ that they shall see the dawn of freedom one day,” she added.
