Ajmer Sharif shrine chief will boycott Raja's visit
09 March, 2013
JAIPUR: The spiritual head of a revered Muslim shrine in India where Pakistan's premier Raja Pervez Ashraf is set to visit at the weekend said on Friday that he objected to the politician's pilgrimage. Ashraf and his family are due to begin a day-long private trip on Saturday to the shrine of Sufi saint Hazrat Khwaja Gharib Nawaz in Ajmer Sharif, some 400 kilometres west of New Delhi. The visit is Ashraf's first trip to India as prime minister and comes at a time of strained relations between New Delhi and Islamabad after tit-for-tat killings of soldiers at the tense border between the neighbours. "I have decided to boycott the visit (to protest) the brutal killing of our Indian soldiers by the Pakistani army," shrine spiritual head Zainul Abedin Ali Khan said. "The incident has hurt Indians," Khan added in a statement. Khan said he would also protest Ashraf's trip because of alleged ill-treatment of Hindus in Pakistan. "There are incidents of atrocities on minorities in Pakistan and we have seen people from the Hindu community migrating to India on account of religious, financial and social persecution in Pakistan," he said. "I am against that, and to express my feelings, I decided to boycott the visit," Khan said. Ajmer Bar Association President Rajesh Tandon described the visit as "intolerable" and warned that lawyers would symbolically cleanse the road on which the Pakistani leader travelled to mark their protest. "This is intolerable for an Indian because of the beheading of our soldier at the LoC," Tandon said. In New Delhi, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told parliament that despite greater contacts between the two South Asian neighbours, ties could improve only if Pakistan shunned its alleged support to cross-border militancy. "People-to-people contacts have gone up, trade relations have shown improvement," Singh said in parliament. "But there cannot be normalisation of relations between our two countries unless and until the terror machine which is still active in Pakistan is brought under control," he added. Ashraf will be the most senior Pakistani to visit India since last April when President Asif Ali Zardari embarked on a similar pilgrimage and then had lunch with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. End.
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