Bangladesh reform proposals include making India part of OIC

State Minister for Foreign Affairs M Shahriar Alam on Sunday said a proposal to include India in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) as an observer has been made as part of reforming the organization. "India is a big country with a huge Muslim population which is bigger than the total population of several Muslim countries," he told reporters after the conclusion of the 45th OIC Council of Foreign Ministers (CFM) at Bangabandhu International Conference Centre in Dhaka. The state minister said Bangladesh's proposal to introduce reforms in the OIC was accepted at the conference, and Bangladesh and Turkey would jointly work on it. While addressing the inaugural session of the OIC-CFM on Saturday, Foreign Minister AH Mahmood Ali had mentioned that a number of countries - which are not OIC members - had large Muslim populations, and stressed the need to build bridges with these states so that the Muslim demographics were not disconnected from OIC. Ali said Muslims might be the minority in those non-OIC countries, but their numbers often exceed the population of many OIC member states. “There's a need to build bridges with those non-OIC countries so that a large number of Muslim populations don't remain untouched by the good work of OIC. That is why, OIC reforms and restructuring should be done," he had said.