Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen has cancelled his visit to India. He was scheduled to tour India from December 12 to14 to attend the Indian Ocean Dialogue and hold talks with his Indian counterpart S Jaishankar.
This comes amid Bangladesh’s strong objections to the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill that was passed by Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian Parliament, on Wednesday.
The visit was subsequently cancelled on Thursday, said a Foreign Ministry official. It came a day after the foreign minister said that the Citizenship
(Amendment) Bill, which seeks to grant citizenship to non-Muslim minorities who left Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan, could weaken India’s historic character as a secular nation.
“We have the Martyred Intellectuals Day on December 14 and Victory Day on December 16. It is important that he (Momen) will stay in the country during this period. Therefore he cancelled the visit,” said the official.
State Minister Shahriar Alam will leave for Madrid on Friday while the foreign secretary is leading a Bangladesh delegation at The International Court of Justice (ICJ), in Hague currently.
The official said, there is a possibility that the foreign minister will visit India next month.
The trip cancellation coincided with the remarks made by Abdul Momen, who outright rejected Indian Home Minister Amit Shah’s remarks on the condition of religious minorities in the country.
The Indian minister, during a debate on their controversial Citizenship Amendment Bill at the Lok Sabha on Monday night, said Hindus, a religious minority in Bangladesh, had “found it impossible” to undertake their religious activities in the country.
“There are a very few countries in the world where communal harmony is as good as in Bangladesh. We have no minorities. We are all equal. If he [Amit Shah] stayed in Bangladesh for a few months, he would have seen the exemplary communal harmony in our country,” Momen added.
