UNITED NATIONS: With India feeling the heat from growing international criticism of its state-sponsored anti-Muslim violence across the country and the continuing atrocities in occupied Kashmir, New Delhi has made the UN a venue of its disinformation campaign against Pakistan to divert attention from the sorry state of affairs at home, according to diplomatic observers.
But the campaign, they said, is not succeeding. The reason: Indian Ambassador TS Tirumurti’s recent outbursts in the UN Security Council, of which India is a member, linking Pakistan to terrorism fell flat amid international media headlines such as “Impending genocide of Muslims in India,” “Hate speech reaching dangerous levels”, Hijab ban in India sparks outrage and protests, and “Human rights abuses escalate in Indian-occupied Kashmir”.
On his part, Tirumurti has been projecting India as a victim of terrorism, asserting that his country has long borne the brunt of cross-border terrorism while referring to the 2008 Mumbai attack and the 2016 Pathankot terror act.
By doing this, India, the observers at the UN believe, is not only failing to divert attention from the deteriorating domestic human rights situation, but also undermining the credibility of the UN bodies of which it is a member.
On the other hand, Pakistan has been effectively countering Indian allegations against Pakistan and New Delhi’s attempt to pose as a victim of terrorism before the international community.
“India is a not a victim of terrorism,” Pakistan UN Ambassador Munir Akram said in several meetings of the 15-member Council and other UIN forums.
“It is the mother ship of terrorism in South Asia,” the Pakistani envoy has told delegates.
“It is Pakistan which has suffered from terrorism in operations that have been conducted since 2014,” he asserted.
“We have cleared our territories of terrorist groups. Our major challenge has been the continued terrorist attacks, financed, sponsored and supported by our neighbor India, including from the territory of Afghanistan,” Ambassador Akram highlighted.
With the active support of the Indian intelligence agencies, ambassador Akram said the TTP and JUA terrorist groups have been involved in many cross-border terrorist attacks against the Pakistani military and civilian targets.
Indeed, diplomatic observers here see India’s rhetoric at the UN as a smokescreen for its sponsorship of terrorism in the region.
An alarming report in The New York Times recently received close attention at the UN and across the United States. Reporting from Haridwar, the leading US newspaper said that Hindu vigilantes have beaten people accused of disrespecting cows, dragged couples out of trains, cafes and homes on suspicion that Hindu women might be seduced by Muslim men; and barged into religious gatherings where they suspect people are being converted.
Gregory Stanton, the founder of Genocide Watch, a nonprofit group, who raised similar warnings ahead of the massacres in Rwanda in the 1990s, told a US congressional briefing that the demonizing and discriminatory “processes” that lead to genocide have been well underway in India.
In an interview with the Times, he said Myanmar was an example of how the easy dissemination of misinformation and hate speech on social media prepares the ground for violence. The difference in India, he said, is that it would be the mobs taking action instead of the military.
“You have to stop it now,” he said, “because once the mobs take over it could really turn deadly.”
And the world-renowned political scientist and activist Noam Chomsky went a step further. He said that Islamophobia has taken a “most lethal form” in India, and turned some 250 million Indian Muslims into a “persecuted minority.”
“The pathology of Islamophobia is growing throughout the West — It is taking its most lethal form in India,” Chomsky, who is also Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said in a video message to a webinar organized last week by Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC), a Washington-based advocacy organization.
Apart from Chomsky, several other academics and activists took part in the webinar on “Worsening Hate Speech and Violence in India.”
