New Delhi: India on Tuesday dismissed as "falsehoods" Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan's comments at a global refugee conference that millions of Muslims could flee India due to "clampdown" in Kashmir and enactment of the amended citizenship law.
In a sharp reaction, External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said Khan has once 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.
In his address at the Global Refugee Forum (GRF) in Geneva, Khan came down hard on India for scrapping special status of Jammu and Kashmir as well as on the amended citizenship law. "It should now be clear to the entire world that this is an established pattern of his (Khan) habitual and compulsive abuse of global forums," the MEA spokesperson said.
"It has been the unfortunate experience of most of Pakistan's neighbours that actions by that country have had adverse consequences next door," he added. The Global Refugee Forum -- the first major meeting on refugees of the 21st century -- was jointly hosted by the UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency and the government of Switzerland.
Rejecting Khan's criticism of the citizenship law, Kumar said, "Over the past 72 years, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan has systematically persecuted all of its minorities, forcing most of them to flee to India. Moreover, Prime Minister Khan wishes the world forgets what his Army did in 1971 to the people of the erstwhile East Pakistan. Pakistan must act to protect and promote the rights of its own minorities and co-religionists," the MEA spokesperson said.
The Citizenship Amendment Act seeks to provide citizenship to non-Muslim religious minorities from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh who arrived in India till December 31, 2014 to escape religious persecution.
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