PM Imran urges world to take notice of reports on Modi govt's ethnic cleansing of Muslims

Islamabad: Modi government's ethnic cleansing of Muslims should send alarm bells ringing across the world that the illegal annexation of Kashmir is part of a wider policy to target Muslims, Prime Minister Imran Khan said on Saturday.

He was reacting to reports in Indian and international media that  Narendra Modi government plans to strip millions of Muslims of their Indian citizenship. 

"Reports in Indian and international media on Modi Govt's ethnic cleansing of Muslims should send alarm bells ringing across the world that the illegal annexation of Kashmir is part of a wider policy to target Muslims," he said on Twitter.

According to reports, Indian Home Minister Amit Shah will be releasing a controversial list that will strip four million people — majority of them Muslims — of their Indian citizenship in Assam.

The final version of the controversial list called the National Register of Citizens is the result of a six-year effort to ostensibly catalogue all the legal residents of the northeastern state of Assam, but the list has been mired in controversy. 

The last time a draft was released, in 2018, 4.1 million people were left off, putting them at risk of being made stateless. Many of them were poor, illiterate and/or members of the Muslim minority.

Observers are worried that the final list will result in families being split up, incarcerated, and even being chased out to Bangladesh — a country many have never set foot in. And rights groups are worried that the list could set off a chain of events similar to the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar in 2017, when roughly 750,000 members of the Muslim Rohingya minority were persecuted, stripped of their Burmese citizenship and forced to flee to Bangladesh.