Minority body stages protest in Kolkata over Uyghur muslims issue

Kolkata: The members of a minority organisation under the banner of Islamic Association for Peace (IAP) on Saturday staged a demonstration outside the Chinese Consulate at Salt Lake on the outskirts of Kolkata, alleging oppression by the Chinese government of the Uyghur muslims at Xinjiang and an alleged attempt by Beijing to show the entire Arunachal Pradesh as Chinese territory.

According to the IAP chairman Najib Ullah, the Chinese authorities have stopped the Islamic practice of offering Namaz five times a day and warned Muslims against keeping beards and their women from putting on burqas.

"Around 10,000 Muslim Uyghurs there have been sent to re-education camps so that they become Communists and give up their religious practices," he said.

He also claimed that human rights groups believe that the Chinese government has detained more than one million Uyghurs against their will over the past few years in a large network of what the state calls "re-education camps".

This is not the first time that the Chinese consulate in Calcutta has witnessed protest demonstrations by local groups on different issues like Tibet developments and frequent Chinese military intrusions across the line of actual control from Ladakh to Arunachal Pradesh.

This is, however, the first time Muslims in Kolkata have protested over both issues.