India rejects Pak resolution on CAA

HT Correspondent

HT Correspondent

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New Delhi India on Tuesday rejected a resolution on the Citizenship (Amendment) Act adopted by Pakistan’s National Assembly, saying it amounted to interference in the country’s internal matters and justification for backing cross-border terrorism.

New Delhi also dismissed Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan’s remarks at the Global Forum on Refugees in Geneva on Tuesday that millions of Muslims could flee India due to the restrictions in Kashmir and the new citizenship law and accused him of peddling “familiar falsehoods at a multilateral platform”.

Pakistan’s National Assembly, or lower house of Parliament, on Monday passed a resolution condemning the CAA on the grounds that it discriminated against minorities, especially Muslims, in India. Khan said at the meeting in Geneva that the law and the lockdown in Kashmir could create “a refugee crisis that would dwarf other crises” and even lead to a conflict between the two countries.

The external affairs ministry said in a statement that the Pakistani parliamentary resolution “makes references to matters that are entirely the internal affairs of India” and was a “thinly veiled attempt by Pakistan to further its false narrative on the issue of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh”.

The statement added, “It seeks to provide justification for Pakistan’s unrelenting support for cross-border terrorist activities in India. We are confident that such attempts will fail.”

India described the resolution as a “poorly disguised effort to divert attention from Pakistan’s appalling treatment and persecution of its own religious minorities”, whose demographics “speak for themselves”.

The resolution “intentionally mischaracterises the objectives” of the CAA, which gives citizenship to foreigners from selected countries who belong to persecuted religious minorities and doesn’t take away citizenship from any Indian irrespective of faith, the statement said.

India said it was “laughable” that Pakistan’s National Assembly, which has passed discriminatory legislation against religious minorities, “should point fingers at others”. Calling for self introspection, the statement said Pakistan should aspire to ideals such as India having governments freely and fairly elected through universal adult franchise, and all Indians, irrespective of faith, enjoying equal rights.

In his response to Khan’s remarks in Geneva, external affairs ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said Pakistan’s Prime Minister had “again peddled familiar falsehoods at a multilateral platform to advance his narrow political agenda by making gratuitous and unwarranted remarks on matters entirely internal to India”.

Kumar said this was an established pattern of Khan’s “habitual and compulsive abuse of global forums”. Over the past 72 years, Pakistan had systematically persecuted all its minorities, “forcing most of them to flee to India”. Khan also wants the world to forget what the Pakistan Army “did in 1971 to the people of the erstwhile East Pakistan,” he added.