All minorities enjoying equal rights in Pakistan: Shehryar Afridi

ISLAMABAD: Chairman of Parliamentary Committee on Kashmir, Shehryar Khan Afridi has said that all religious minorities living across Pakistan were enjoying equal rights and the world should learn from Pakistan’s model of equal treatment of its minorities.

Addressing participants of a seminar held at the Pakistan Institute of Parliamentary Services (PIPS) on the occasion of National Minorities Day, Afridi said that the sole objective to observe this day was to make the whole world realize the significance of the rights of minorities, said a press statement.

Afridi further said that the Indian government has unleashed a reign of terror on Indian minorities and Muslims are specifically being targetted. He said, in February 2020, 36 Muslims were butchered, some even burned to death by Hindu mobs in New Delhi while scores of mosques were also razed to the ground.

Indian atrocities on minority communities in general and Kashmiris in particular increasing day by day, he added. Shehryar Afridi said that the world community carries a responsibility to provide the right of self-determination to the people of Indian Occupied Jammu & Kashmir (IOJK). “It’s about time that the developed world must intervene before it’s too late,” he added.

On this occasion, Azad Kashmir President Sardar Masood Khan said that Kashmiri society was very compassionate and there was full religious freedom for minorities in Azad Jammu & Kashmir.

He said that the RSS regime was propagating and practicing fascism. He said that unlike Pakistan which was created in the name of Islam, India was created in the name of secularism. However, he said the BJP government had unleashed a reign of terror towards Indian Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and Dalits.

“The international community requires to take notice of the systematic cleansing of Kashmiris: there would be no Kashmiri to defend in the next two or three years,” he said.

In his speech, Rt Reverend Bishop Dr Azad Marshall, president of the National Council of Churches in Pakistan (NCCP), said that Quaid-e-Azam wanted minorities to be treated equally in Pakistan.

“Christian lawmakers in Punjab Assembly voted for Pakistan in the 1940s. We need to set a new model of harmony, coexistence and prosperity of minorities in Pakistan, ” he stressed.

Condemning Indian atrocities on Kashmiris, Bishop Marshall said that there have been over 15,000 reported incidents of looting, vandalizing and burning of Christian churches in India in the recent years.