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DNA Special: Pakistan’s five bogus claims against India at UNSC and how it stands exposed on ‘minority rights’

Pakistan once again showed its “double standards” at the UN Security Council as it accused India of persecuting minorities. Its newly appointed foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari told five blatant lies at the UNSC, not just about India, but for his own country too. 

His first lie was that the rights of minorities were being protected in Pakistan; second that all the citizens of Pakistan have religious freedom; third that there India has an anti-Muslim mentality; fourth that rights are being snatched away from the minorities in India; and fifth that India is becoming a Hindu-majority nation.

The truth is that Zardari was compulsively lying at the world’s biggest platform. The entire world is aware of the fact that Pakistan is the epicentre of terrorism. The world also knows that it is a country where people are not even familiar to terms like “rights of minorities”. 

The biggest proof of this is the declining population of minorities in Pakistan. Here are some facts to expose Zardari’s false claims: 

At the time of Independence, Pakistan’s total population comprised of 77 per cent Muslims and 14 per cent Hindus. In the last census of 2011, the Muslim population increased to 96.2 per cent and the Hindu population decreased to 1.6 per cent. 

On the other hand, the 1951 census in India showed that Hindu population stood at 84.1 per cent while the Muslim population was 9.8 per cent. In 2011, the Hindu population declined to 79.8 per cent and the Muslim population increased to 14.2 per cent.  

According to International Forum for Rights and Security (IFFRAS), Pakistan is moving in an increasingly conservative Islamist direction, and the situation for Hindus, Christians and other religious minorities, especially that of women, has worsened.

The situation faced by the Hindu and Christian groups in Pakistan is bad in general, but women from these communities are the worst victims of discriminatory attitudes of the authorities, political groups, religious parties, the feudal structure and the Muslim majority.

Religious minority women and girls are abducted, forcibly converted, married and abused, and their families are unsuccessful in their attempts to challenge these crimes using legal avenues, reported IFFRAS.

While the abductions, forced conversions, forced marriages, the fate of religious minority women and girls is often sealed as the existing laws or handling of such cases through legal recourse is unavailable or ineffective.

Human rights groups have documented the plight of Pakistan’s religious minorities for years, but it is only recently that these minorities have become the focus of popular discourse because of revelations on social media regarding their treatment, reported IFFRAS.

Source: dnaindia.com