Prime Minister Imran Khan urged a powerful US-based association of Pakistani doctors to step up their lobbying and propaganda efforts, while setting an example by once again comparing Modi’s India with Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
“You are the most educated, with the most awareness,” Khan told members of the Association of Physicians of Pakistani Descent of North America (APPNA), who gathered for an annual meeting in Peshawar, Pakistan on Saturday.
APPNA is the third largest medical association in the US, representing more than 17,000 physicians. It trails behind the union of 80,000 doctors of Indian origin and the 240,000-strong American Medical Association – but the Pakistani non-profit has yet to unleash its full potential, Khan believes.
A vocal critic of his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi, the Pakistani PM railed against the contentious Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and India’s move to revoke the special status of Kashmir, going as far as to drop a ‘Nazi’ bomb to woo the audience and inspire them to help Islamabad in countering New Delhi’s “fascist” propaganda with its own narrative.
“The programs they are bringing in are identical to those in Hitler’s Nazi Germany when they committed genocide of the Jews,” he told the crowd, accusing India of violating “all humanitarian laws and international laws,” as well as persecuting and even committing “war crimes” against Muslims.
Dismissing criticism of their policies as mostly uninformed and misguided, Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have long argued that reorganizing Kashmir will help to combat terrorism and boost the region’s economy as it becomes more integrated into India.
As for the CAA, the law makes it easier to acquire citizenship for six religious minorities arriving from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The government insists the action is non-discriminatory and only signifies that the people of India have “decided to accept the minorities who have faced humiliation” in these Muslim-majority states. New Delhi says that the law, which sparked protests and deadly riots across the nation, affects neither Indian Muslims not foreigners who can still acquire citizenship under existing laws.