UNITED NATIONS – A Pakistani delegate hit back at India on Friday for portraying as “hate speech” the remarks made earlier by Pakistan while highlighting in the UN General Assembly the Indian atrocities in Jammu and Kashmir.
“It is startling that those whose very identity is based on peddling supremacist ideologies, neo-fascist beliefs, bigotry and intolerance; whose singular accomplishment is to denude India of any pretense of its secular credentials, have the audacity to lecture others on ‘hate speech’,” Jehanzeb Khan, first secretary at the Pakistan Mission to the UN, told the 193-member assembly.
He was exercising his right of reply to India’s diplomat K Nagaraj Naidu who angrily reacted to a speech delivered by Pakistani representative Saad Ahmed Warraich that called on the UN Security Council to implement its own resolutions on the decades-old Kashmir dispute and to the suffering of Kashmiri people.
The exchange took place during the General Assembly’s debate on the “Report of the Secretary-General on the work of the Organization.”
Naidu, the Indian diplomat, accused Pakistan of “spewing venom” against India and indulging in “bellicose and vitriolic diatribe”.
Exercising his right of reply, Jehanzeb Khan, the Pakistani delegate, said the “mothership” of the ruling BJP in India – the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), is a fascist organization which endorsed Hitler’s aim to”purify” the “Aryan race” by eliminating the Jews, pointing out that its leaders have advocated similar “cleansing” of Muslims and other minorities from India’s “Aryan” Hindu population.
“For these purveyors of bigotry and hatred, it is indeed gratifying that one of their most promising prodigies, whose hands are drenched with the blood of thousands of innocent Muslims in Gujarat, is overseeing this ‘Hindutva’ agenda at the national level.”
Today, he said, RSS’ violent thugs behave like Hitler’s “brown shirts”, lynching Muslims and coercing journalists into silence. The aim of India’s 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act is to deny Muslims the same rights as other Indian citizens, he said, emphasizing that it violates several international conventions prohibiting discrimination.
Meanwhile, in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, the BJP-RSS government is imposing a “final solution”, much like the Nazi party once did, seeking to re-engineer the demographics of that occupied territory, the Pakistani delegate said, describing the complete lockdown of the state for more than 170 days as an admission that the occupation can only be accomplished by force and has been widely rejected by the international community.
“The central reality is the dire human rights and humanitarian situation in occupied Jammu and Kashmir and the denial of fundamental right of self-determination pledged to the Kashmiris by India, Pakistan and the international community and enshrined in the UN Security Council resolutions,” Jehanzeb Khan said.
“No amount of oppression and obfuscation by the occupying power, India, can extinguish this is inalienable right of the Kashmir people.”
