By Uzma Ehtasham
In the theatre of South Asian diplomacy, few exchanges carry the weight of accusation that Pakistan and India routinely level at one another. The ritual is familiar: a statement from New Delhi, a rejoinder from Islamabad, and the international community, weary of what it perceives as perpetual acrimony, turns its gaze elsewhere. However, when Islamabad’s foreign office spokesperson, Tahir Andrabi, issued his rejoinder this week to recent Indian statements, the substance of his rebuttal deserved more than the usual dismissal as cross-border point-scoring. Beneath the familiar rhetoric lies a truth that the international community has for too long treated as an inconvenient distraction: India’s treatment of its own minorities is not a secondary issue, not a footnote to the larger story of the subcontinent, but a deepening crisis that demands urgent scrutiny before it becomes entirely irreversible.
Pakistan’s response was pointed, as such responses often are. The allegation from New Delhi, Andrabi suggested, was a deliberate misdirection—a bid to divert attention from a grim domestic reality that has become too visible to hide. And the figures he cited are indeed stark, the kind of numbers that ought to stop a reader cold. In 2025 alone, more than 55 people were killed by mobs in India. Not in a conflict zone, not in a disputed territory, but in a country that presents itself to the world as the world’s largest democracy. In the opening months of 2026, at least 19 Muslims have already lost their lives to vigilante violence. What makes these numbers particularly chilling is the pattern that accompanies them: those responsible for atrocities against minorities frequently operate with what appears to be state protection, or at least state impunity.
Arrests are rare. Convictions are rarer. Justice, for the victims, is an abstraction. To speak of India’s record on minority rights is to confront a catalogue of systemic failure that has been decades in the making. Muslims, the country’s largest minority, face targeting not only in disputed Kashmir—where human rights abuses have long been documented by international bodies and where the revocation of special autonomy in 2019 effectively placed the region under military rule—but across the wider republic. In Uttar Pradesh, in Gujarat, in Delhi, the pattern repeats: mobs assembled, violence unleashed, cameras rolling, and the machinery of the state either standing still or, in some documented cases, actively facilitating. Sikhs have never recovered from the pogroms that followed Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, a wound that remains unhealed and unacknowledged by the state that directed its fury against an entire community.
Christians, too, have seen their churches set ablaze and their communities terrorized under laws that make conversion—or even the suspicion of conversion—a criminal offence. This is not merely a story of sporadic violence; it is, as critics have long warned, a pattern of institutionalized exclusion, punitive legislation, and a political climate in which bigotry has been not merely tolerated but normalized, celebrated, and rewarded with electoral success. The language of genocide is not one that diplomats deploy lightly, and for good reason. The word carries the weight of history’s darkest chapters. Yet the international monitoring group Genocide Watch has assessed that India has now crossed seven of the ten stages of genocide as defined by the organization’s scholarly framework.
The United Nations, the European Union, the United States, and other influential international actors have a responsibility to move beyond expressions of concern and routine condemnation. Concern, expressed in careful diplomatic language, has been the standard response for a decade. It has changed nothing. The situation demands concrete action: targeted sanctions against officials responsible for inciting or facilitating violence, suspension of security cooperation agreements, independent investigations into atrocities, and a willingness to name what is happening without the usual euphemisms about “complexities” and “internal matters.” If the international community waits until the worst has passed—until the machinery of exclusion has completed its work—it will find itself guilty not merely of oversight, but of complicity. Silence, at this stage, is not neutrality. It is endorsement.
Pakistan’s intervention, whatever its geopolitical motivations, has drawn attention to a truth that cannot be wished away. One need not endorse Pakistan’s own human rights record to recognize that its accusations against India on this specific matter are grounded in evidence, in documentation, in the testimony of survivors and the reports of international monitoring organizations. India’s minorities are living under siege. Their rights are being stripped away in incremental but deliberate steps. Their lives are being taken with a regularity that no longer makes headlines. And the world’s silence, sustained for so long under the comfortable fiction that India is different, that India is a democracy, that India’s rise is good for everyone, is no longer tenable. It never was.
(The writer is a public health professional, journalist, and possesses expertise in health communication, having keen interest in national and international affairs, can be reached at uzma@metro-morning.com)
