Hindu American Foundation slams USCIRF for Hinduphobic declaration

Kashmiri Pandits, Shivaratri, Hindu American Foundation,US Religious Freedom Commission ,USCIRF, Pakistan, Khalistan, Kashmiri Hindus, Iqtidar Cheema, Khalistan, Babbar Khalsa

Hindu American Foundation (HAF) attacked US Religious Freedom Commission (USCIRF) for putting India in list of “Country of Particular Concern Watch list,” or “Tier 2” list in league with Afghanistan, Turkey, Russia, and others.

Suhag A. Shukla, Executive Director of the Hindu American Foundation, also admonished the body stating that the Commission makes the overtly Hinduphobic declaration that caste-based discrimination is rooted in Hindu scripture.

In her article, the executive Director of the Hindu American Foundation also noted the that “despite many nominations, USCIRF has seated only a single Hindu or Indian American commissioner, and none for nearly a decade.”

Worse, the Hindu American Foundation activist has pointed out that the India’s report was not authored by any of the staff employed by USCIRF. Instead, USCIRF simply gave its imprimatur to a British activist, Iqtidar Cheema.

Cheema, a native of Pakistan, has been honored by several Pakistani government bodies, and is true to Pakistan’s foreign policy goals as well.Cheema’s work provides cover to Pakistan’s long-standing support of a bloody proxy war to separate the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir from India. Not surprisingly then, this report fails to mention the plight of over 300,000 Kashmiri Hindu Pandits cleansed from their ancestral homeland in the Valley at the hands of Islamist radicals. Previous commission reports have ignored the same.

Role of Cheema in attacking India scrutinized by the Hindu American Foundation:

Shukla says that Cheema is also an oft-quoted source to support various organizations that endorse a separatist movement calling for a separate Sikh state, Khalistan — a cause that the vast majority of Sikhs in India refuse to support. Khalistani terrorism led to an insurgency which left tens of thousands of Hindus and Sikhs dead in the Indian state of Punjab in the 1980s. This activism took its most bizarre and dangerous turn when Cheema addressed a crowd of Sikh separatists gathered in San Francisco calling for Khalistan and shouts supporting the Babbar Khalsa, a terrorist organization banned by the United Kingdom and India.

Cheema’s activism consistently suffers from a habit of citing fringe and discredited sources to corroborate his grotesque positions. Not only has Cheema accused Indian intelligence agencies of fomenting attacks within Pakistan, but he cited Webster Griffin Tarpley — the same person who claims that the military industrial complex perpetrated 9/11 attacks and just admitted to making false defamatory statements against Melania Trump!

Read the full article by Executive Director of the Hindu American Foundation Suhag A. Shukla here.

Pic credit: Roots in Kashmir

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