IAMC says Indian minister’s claims are “baseless and fraudulent.”
Washington, DC,-based advocacy group Indian American Muslim Council has denounced allegations by the Indian government that it is connected to the Pakistan intelligence agency and an organization that is banned in India because of terror links.
Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, India’s minister of minority affairs, accused the IAMC of spreading anti-India propaganda and being part of a conspiracy that led to violence in the Indian state of Tripura.
“Some people are becoming a part of anti-India conspiracy of Pakistan-sponsored organizations,” he said at press conference in New Delhi. “These organizations are conspiring to create confusion over India’s culture and inclusivity.”
The allegations came a day after the IAMC hosted a congressional briefing where four U.S. lawmakers criticized the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi of curbing religious freedom in India and undermining the country’s secular tradition.
“IAMC categorically denies all these allegations and challenges Minister Naqvi and Prime Minister Modi’s government to furnish evidence to prove even one of these baseless and fraudulent claims,” the group said in a press release Friday. “IAMC does not have ties to Pakistan, ISI or SIMI. IAMC has zero history of spreading communal violence in India.”
ISI is the Inter-Services Intelligence, the chief intelligence agency of Pakistan. SIMI, or Students’ Islamic Movement of India, has been banned in India since 2001.
“To IAMC’s knowledge, there is no governmental or police document, or a court ruling, anywhere in India connecting the IAMC to any communal violence, to Pakistan, to the ISI, to any terror group, in or out of India,” the group said.
It added: “In 20 years of its existence as a bona fide nonprofit organization in the US, no American law enforcement agency has ever remotely suggested that IAMC was connected with terrorism, directly or indirectly. No law enforcement agency in the US has ever even investigated IAMC.”
“Many of us were born and raised in India and although we have chosen to make America our home, we have deep cultural, familial and emotional ties to India,” the release said. “These ties to the country of our birth are our primary impetus to speak up in regards to the grave dangers that confront Indian society today.”