At UN, Pakistan calls for protecting suffering people of Indian-occupied Kashmir, Muslims in India.

Pakistan has urged those who propagate the concept of responsibility to protect, or R2P, to reflect on the need for collective action to protect the people of occupied Palestine and of Indian-occupied Jammu and Kashmir.

"For more than 7 decades, India has, through force and fraud, denied the right of self-determination to the Kashmiri people, in violation of multiple resolutions of the Security Council prescribing a free and fair plebiscite," Ambassador Aamir Khan, deputy permanent representative of Pakistan to the UN, told a special meeting of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) on 'Social and economic measures to prevent genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity'.

The Pakistani envoy also drew international community's attention to the "systematic campaign" under way in India by the adherents of Hindutva where Muslims are murdered by lynch mobs, subjected to periodic pogroms and robbed of their livelihoods and citizenship, under the patronage and with the encouragement of the ruling BJP-RSS Government.

Most recently, he said, a BBC documentary has also examined the pogrom against Muslims during the riots in the western state of Gujarat in 2002, noting that the documentary, which was banned in India, underlined that the campaign had 'all the hallmarks of an ethnic cleansing.'

Noticing this dangerous trend, Professor Gregory Stanton, the founder of Genocide Watch, has warned that a genocide of Muslims could very well happen in India.

"Such crimes fall squarely within the ambit of the World Summit's decisions on the responsibility to protect," Ambassador Aamir Khan said.

(The concept of R2P rests upon three pillars: the responsibility of each State to protect its populations; the responsibility of the international community to assist States in protecting their populations; and the responsibility of the international community to protect when a State is manifestly failing to protect its populations.)

"One specific circumstance where provisions of the principle of protection should apply is in situations of foreign occupation or alien domination, which can easily spiral into genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity," the Pakistani envoy said.

"We would request the views of those who propagate the R2P concept on the need for collective action to protect the people of occupied Palestine or of Indian-occupied Jammu and...