ISLAMABAD - Special Assistant to Prime Minister on Interfaith Harmony and Middle East Allama Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi has said that people from all school of thoughts and religions have rejected the United States assessment of declaring Pakistan a country with no religious tolerance.
Interacting with media here yesterday, Tahir Ashrafi said that the assessment of the US Secretary of State was against the reality and had no link with the ground reality. Criticising the US commission for ignoring Indian brutalities with the religious minorities, Tahir Ashrafi said that religious minorities and especially Muslims were regularly being killed in India but the commission didn’t bother to look into the Indian brutalities against religious minorities in India.
He maintained that the US commission should visit Pakistan and they will provide the facts and figures; adding that the constitution of Pakistan was providing protection and basic rights including religious freedom to the minorities of the country.
He said that the world should highlight any case of misuse of the Namoos-e-Risalat law in Pakistan; saying that religious minorities were enjoying all the rights granted by Constitution. He added that on the directives of PM Imran Khan they were closely monitoring the rights of the religious minorities in Pakistan.
He claimed that Pakistan was a safe country for minorities and was even safer than US and any other country. He elaborated that Remsha Maseeh being safe and sound in Pakistan was a clear example about how minorities are given their basic rights in Pakistan .
It must be noted that the US Secretary of State on Tuesday announced that Pakistan, China, Burma, Eritrea, Iran, Nigeria, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan were being designated “for engaging in or tolerating systematic, ongoing, egregious violations of religious freedom.
The Foreign Office earlier in its response had said the designation was completely against the realities on the ground and raises serious doubts about the credibility of the exercise.” It said that such “subjective designations” did not help the cause of global religious freedom.
