Accusing Ghulam Nabi Azad of facilitating the narrative of the RSS and the BJP, PDP chief Mehbooba Mufti said on Monday that his recent statement on Indian Muslims was highly divisive.

Azad had recently said that Muslims in India are there because of conversions from Hindus and in Kashmir, all Muslims were converted from Kashmiri Pandits.

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Terming the claim of Azad “highly regrettable”, Mehbooba said, in a statement from Srinagar, that “it echoes the ideology and narrative of RSS BJP against the Muslims of the country”.

She said Azad’s remarks were “dangerous and divisive” and that they “resemble the language of the RSS, BJP and Janasangh”. Such remarks “manifest in the atrocities and violence against Muslims in the country”, as evidenced by the “recent incident in Uttar Pradesh where the parents of a Muslim boy who had married a Hindu girl were lynched”.

Mehbooba said that the Muslims in India are “unsafe” because of this mindset. The government is supposed to build houses, but the BJP government is “busy demolishing them selectively, especially those that belong to Muslims”.

Referring to BJP’s criticism of recent induction of Mushaal Malik in the interim ministry of Pakistan, Mehbooba said, “I am not an advocate of Mushaal Malik but she is not any terrorist or even a terror accused unlike her husband”.

It is worth mentioning here that Mushaal is the wife of Yaseen Malik who is a terrorism accused and is lodged in Tihar Jail and facing charges of killing four IAF officers in Kashmir.

Mehbooba said, “But in the BJP we have terror-accused people like Sadvhi Pragya Thakur who openly calls for genocide of Muslims and BJP is rewarding such people.”

“In the case of Mushaal, there is something to learn for the BJP-RSS regime that Pakistan is rewarding those they think are furthering their ideas on Jammu & Kashmir but unfortunately what our government does is to punish people who stood by and propagated the Idea of India in Jammu & Kashmir.

“Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah Sahab being a case in point who the BJP wants to erase from history, nothing less can be said about Mufti sahib who held the idea of India so dear to him,” she added.