Daily Times

Chairman of Parliamentary Committee on Kashmir Shehryar Khan Afridi has said that Pakistan has set a model of equal treatment to its minorities and the world needs to learn from it.

Addressing the participants of a seminar held here at Pakistan Institute of Parliamentary Services (PIPS) in connection with World Minorities Day, Shehryar Afridi said that the sole objective to observe this day is to make the whole world realise the significance of the rights of minorities. He said that the Indian government has unleashed a reign of terror against Indian minorities and Muslims are specifically are being lynched under a vicious plan of genocide.

Afridi said that in February this year, 36 Muslims were butchered some even burned to death by the hindu mobsters in India’s capital Delhi while scores of mosques were also razed to ground. “The Hindu mobsters were publicly praised by the ruling party parliamentarians with the backing of Hindu Terror Group RSS,” he added.

He said that the Indian atrocities being meted out to the minorities in general and Kashmiris in particular must be given an end. He said that the world community carries a responsibility to provide right of self-determination to the people of Illegally Indian Occupied Jammu & Kashmir (IIOJK). “It’s about time that the developed world must intervene before it’s too late. India under a genocide plan is killing its minorities and Muslims are a special target of Indian subjugation”.

Afridi said that minorities are a target of Indian regime which claims to be secular but practices Hindutva agenda. “If Muslims are target today, it was Sikh massacre in 1984. It’s not only about Muslims. Dalits and Christians are also being exterminated systematically. Indian bureaucrats and politicians publicly kill Muslims but they also promote Muslim lynching on social and electronic media. Minorities are being killed under a plan, ” argued Afridi. He said World War-I and World War-II erupted due to failure of nations to provide justice to the oppressed.

Chairman of Kashmir Committee warned that if the United Nations and prosperous world fail to stop systematic bloodshed and ethnic cleansing of Kashmiris in India, Kashmir may become a nuclear flash point which may have impact beyond the region.

President of Azad Jammu & Kashmir Sardar Masood Khan said that Kashmiri society was very compassionate and there was full religious freedom for minorities in Azad Jammu & Kashmir.

He said that the RSS regime was propagating and practicing fascism. He said that unlike Pakistan which was created in the name of Islam, India was created in the name of secularism. However, he said, the BJP government had unleashed a reign of terror towards Indian Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and Dalits.

He said Kashmiris have been killed, maimed, incarcerated under a plan to turn the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir into a minority.

“The world community needs to take notice of the systematic cleansing of Kashmiris: there would be no Kashmiri to defend in next two or three years”.

He said if the world fails to intervene the massacre, the world would be equally responsible along with the RSS for the Kashmiris genocide.

He said that a large number of Hindus are being brought to Kashmir to change the demography of Kashmir.

He said that Hindus, Christians, Sikhs and other minorities are an integral part of Kashmiri polity.

Todd Shea, the head of CDRS and US citizen working to help earthquake victims in Azad Kashmir said that the hypocrisy of the US and its media reflected a very wrong picture of Pakistan.

“When I came to Pakistan to help the earthquake victims, I was shown a negative picture of Pakistan. But Pakistanis gave my colleagues and nuns more dignity and respect than other Pakistanis. This reflects how well minorities are treated here,” he said.