NEW DELHI: Minority affairs minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi on Thursday told a visiting European Union delegation, including its special representative for human rights Eamon Gilmore, that constitutional and religious rights of every community are absolutely safe in India, but “nobody has the right to indulge in forceful and fraudulent religious conversion”.
Naqvi is learnt to have told the delegation that some people have been constantly trying to “defame” Prime Minister Narendra Modi and India as part of a “conspiracy”. According to sources, he also said that “sometimes they write letters, while at other times they raise the “bogey of Islamophobia”. The six-member delegation, which included Gilmore and EU Ambassador to India Ugo Astuto, met Naqvi at his residence in Delhi.
The minister told the delegation that terrorist organisations such as al-Qaida and IS had been successful in their nefarious designs in European and other countries but they never succeeded in India. Sources said, the minister is learnt to have emphasised that this was so “only because of India’s strength of cultural co-existence and unity in diversity”.
Naqvi also shared with the delegation that the Modi government in the last eight years has given scholarships to over five crore minority students. He also told the delegation that the percentage of minorities in central government jobs, which was below 4% in 2014, has now significantly increased to above 10%.