-Criticizes India’s massive disinformation campaign
-Highlights Indian rights abuses in IoK
-Terms India to be an extremist country
-Says India has also unleashed a reign of terror against Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Dalits
By Asghar Ali Mubarak
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has slammed India at the UNHCR for its bleak human rights record, deteriorating human rights situation in Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK) and for emerging as the largest extremist country where minorities live under constant threat.
Pakistan during the ongoing 46th session of the UN Human Rights Council has decried India’s massive disinformation campaign against Pakistan and drew its attention on New Delhi’s failure to respond to the widely reported Indian grave rights abuses in Occupied Kashmir that evoked international condemnation. The Council is meeting in Geneva from 22 February to 19 March at the United Nations Office, an event where Pakistan showed the world the real face of India of stifling the voice of Kashmiris.
India has also unleashed a reign of terror against Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Dalits, the low caste Hindus, and the list goes on. “India has failed and will continue to fail in hiding its brutal repression of Kashmiri people behind the self-serving smokescreen of terrorism,” Junaid Suleman, a Pakistani diplomat, told the Geneva-based Council in the exercise of his right of reply after an Indian representative made oft-repeated allegations about Pakistan’s involvement in terrorism.
“As Pakistan highlights India’s atrocities in Occupied Jammu & Kashmir, which have been well-documented by the Office of 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 world’s largest democracy but has shamelessly violated every human rights principle, norms and laws,” said Suleman, a second secretary at the Pakistan Mission in Geneva.
The Indian representative, Pawankumar Badhe, had reacted to Pakistan Ambassador Khalil Hashmi’s speech in which the Pakistani envoy had urged the UN right chief to conduct an impartial investigation into India’s multiple violations of human rights in the disputed territory. Pakistani diplomat Suleman said New Delhi’s “compulsive obsession with Pakistan is neither new nor surprising”, and pointed that the Indian govt had deployed tools of deflection, deception and disinformation as evident from the EU DisInfo Lab’s two investigative reports and the “infamous Goswami saga”. He also mentioned 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,” the Pakistani diplomat said.
