STAFF REPORTER
ISLAMABAD Sardar Masood Khan, President Azad Jammu and Kashmir, has expressed grave concern about a vicious campaign in India to demonize Muslims in pursuance of the Hindutva agenda. Two hundred million Muslims living in India are being stereotyped and projected as aliens, dangerous and even responsible for spreading the coronavirus. “Islamophobia is spreading like wild fire in India”, the President said adding that Muslims were being hounded by a social media pandemic. The AJK President said that prestigious international newspapers and magazines have exposed the Bharatiya Janata Party’s fascist agenda to segregate and dehumanize Muslims throughout India. He also highlighted that Ambassador Sam Brownback, the US State Department’s focal point for International Religious Freedom, has asked governments, including that of India, to stop blaming religious minorities for Covid19 virus. President Masood Khan said that the systematic discrimination, xenophobia and intolerance against Muslims in India is reminiscent of the practices of the Nazi Party in the 1930s and 1940s which segregated, incarcerated and exterminated German Jews and the entire process culminated in a holocaust. Hindu extremist, led by the BJP squads, he said, are targeting Muslims by hate speech and trolling them through social media, crafting false stories and making fake videos viral to hold Muslims responsible for the spread of the coronavirus. The Tableeghi Jumaat has been especially targeted, while many other Hindu congregations that were held during the same period of soft-lockdown have neither been questioned nor persecuted. President Masood Khan also condemned the killing of nine youth by Indian occupation forces in the last two days in a fresh a spate of murderous cordon and search operations. “The killing spree has been accelerated by twin lockdowns. But despite a curfew, thousands have attended the funeral prayers of the martyrs”, he said. Turning to the illegal domicile rules, the President said that the Kashmiris have rejected these black-laws and colonial measures to grab Kashmiris’ jobs, land and seats in the educational institutions. The President welcomed the statement by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which expresses deep concern over the Indian domicile rules introduced in the IOJK that would illegally change the demographic structure in a UN-recognized disputed territory. The President said that the OIC statement rightly underlines that these rules compound the dire situation in IOJK that has been prevalent since August 5, 2019. He urged the OIC to work with the UN to quash these rules in a disputed territory which are a blot on the endeavours to establish the supremacy of international rule of law. The AJK President reminded the world that the BJP’s domicile rules are unlawful and are being foisted on the Kashmiris without their consent. Citing Martin Luther King who had said, “…never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal’”, the President called upon the international community to denounce India’s lawless laws. The President also demanded that India should immediately release Kashmiris detained in prisons and concentration camps, most of them teenagers and children, because there was a serious danger of the coronavirus spreading in these cramped lockups
