India on Thursday slammed the UN Special Rapporteur for freedom of religion or belief for bias in reporting on burials and funerals in India and for failing to take into account the gravity of terrorism, IANS reported from the United Nations.

Source: IANS

Bhavika Mangalanandan, a First Secretary in India's UN Mission, told the General Assembly's Third Committee that deriving political mileage out of people's pain and loss should not be a topic that special rapporteurs base relevance on, according to IANS.

"We are surprised that the fervent advocacy for the rights of terrorists who violate the most sacred right of humans, the right to life, does not similarly extend to the victims of terrorism," she said, adding that a terrorist not only kills innocent people but damages the psyche of a nation.

Mangalanandan was responding to a report by Special Rapporteur Nazila Ghanea on funeral rights in exceptional circumstances, which said bodies of persons killed in security operations in Kashmir were not returned to families and were buried in remote areas, and cited restrictions during the Citizenship Amendment Act agitation, IANS reported.

India also criticised the report for bias against the Global South, saying it suggested discrimination and wrong practices during Covid-19 supposedly took place only in the Global South while remaining silent about similar situations in industrialised nations, according to BizzBuzz's reporting of the same IANS story.