WASHINGTON: The UN Security Council should address violence against women in Indian-administered Kashmir, Pakistan has asserted.
Pakistan’s UN ambassador Munir Akram emphasised the necessity of ending the use of sexual assault as a weapon in armed conflict during a Security Council debate on the week-long International Women’s Day.
According to him, “the continuous violence against women and girls in India-occupied Jammu and Kashmir is not discussed much” in the Security Council’s debate.
He asserted that “there is recorded evidence of rape and sexual assault being utilised as a weapon of war.”
At a recent virtual conference in Washington, on “genocidal hate speech and the state’s role,” the matter was brought up.
It was revealed that “genocide is already taking place in India” by Adama Dieng, a former registrar of the International Criminal Tribunal in Rwanda.
“Today, growing religious intolerance in India is vandalising the fabric of interfaith cooperation,” he remarked. Intolerant and discriminatory behaviour threatens our society, yet officials seem unconcerned about it.
Mr Dieng claimed he was “disappointed” when the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) targeted India’s Muslim minority and noted that there were over 200 million Muslims in the country.
“The slaughter in India would significantly threaten international ties,” he said, calling on foreign leaders to express it to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Anti-Muslim violence increased after 2014, according to Indian journalist Alishaan Jafri, who works for Wire and Al Jazeera.
According to a report, “most of the victims of mob violence from 2014 to 2019 were those who worked in the dairy or meat industries, and they were just slain by mobs.”
During the coronavirus outbreak and lockdown, Muslims were blamed for spreading the disease and accused of plotting to take over India by killing Hindus, as he emphasised in his remarks.
One of India’s most prominent Muslim Congress MPs Salman Khurshid, who served as the country’s minister of external affairs, was assaulted and had his house set on fire, he recounted.
Indian Muslim celebrity Shahrukh Khan was accused of spitting at a funeral by members of the ruling party, and this falsehood was widely disseminated.
Indian writer and poet Kaushik Raaj informed the audience that India’s political landscape has shifted dramatically since the BJP took power in 2014.
While the world community swiftly responded to the mob lynching of Muhammad Akhlaq in Uttar Pradesh, the local party president visited the suspects and “promised them government positions, and they received government employment,” he said.
No one has been prosecuted for killing scores of Muslims in New Delhi in 2020, Mr Raaj reminded the audience.
