Pakistan condemns construction of 'Ram Mandir' on site of Babri mosque

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan condemned the construction of "Ram Mandir" on the site of historic Babri Masjid on Wednesday, and urged the international community to play its part in saving the Islamic heritage sites from the "Hindutva" regime, and ensure protection and religious rights of minorities in India.

"Pakistan reiterates its strong condemnation of construction of "Ram Mandir" on the site where historic Babri Masjid stood for around five centuries," Foreign Office spokesperson Aisha Farooqui said. Earlier in the day, Indian Prime Minister Narenda Modi laid the foundation stone of the controversial temple on the site of the historic Babri Masjid in Ayodhya.

"The flawed judgment of the Indian Supreme Court paving the way for construction of the temple not only reflected the preponderance of faith over justice but also the growing majoritarianism in today's India, where minorities, particularly Muslims and their places of worship, are increasingly under attack," Farooqui said.

A temple built on the site of a historic mosque will remain a blot on the face of the so-called Indian democracy for the times to come, she said, adding the painful scenes of the demolition of Babri Masjid by the BJP and its extremist Hindu affiliates in 1992 remain fresh in the minds of Muslims across the globe.

Since then, she added, the OIC had passed numerous resolutions condemning the heinous act of demolishing the centuries-old mosque.

Future generations of Muslims would continue to be cognizant of the new illegitimate structure, which the Hindutva-driven BJP has campaigned for, and is bent upon constructing as part of its agenda of converting India into a "Hindu Rashtra".

"Today's event in Ayodhya reflected an unrelenting drive in this direction," she added.

She stated that the extreme haste in starting construction of a temple at the Babri Masjid site amid the ravaging Covid-19 pandemic, anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), the looming National Register of Citizens (NRC) to disenfranchise Muslims, the targeted killings of Muslims in Delhi with state complicity early this year, and other anti-Muslim measures point to the fact how Muslims in India are being demonised, dispossessed, marginalised and subjected to targeted violence.

She asserted that India's gross and systematic human rights violations in the Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK), and the BJP's sinister design to change the demography of the occupied territory, all reflect the rising tide of the divisive and extremist ideology in India, which poses threat to religious harmony in India, and to regional peace.

She said the RSS-BJP together were responsible for continued targeting and destruction of places of worship of Muslims in India in an organised manner, whether it was during the Gujarat pogrom in 2002 or Delhi pogrom in 2020, adding the attacks by Hindu extremists on mosques had continued even during the on-going pandemic.

"Not only Muslims have been blamed for spreading the Covid-19 but their religious freedom has also come under attack by the BJP-RSS zealots who treat minorities as second-class citizens," she added.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2020