Reiterating that Pakistan spoke to the Chinese on any issues they had "behind closed doors", Khan asked why what India was doing in Kashmir - which he likened to an "open-air prison camp" - was not an issue, calling it a matter of "hypocrisy", reports BBC.

China and Pakistan are all-weather allies.

Khan made the remark in his interview with Axios HBO.

Journalist Mehdi Hasan said Khan's remark was 'painful' to watch.

"This is painful to watch. In which Imran Khan pretends the Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang aren't being persecuted because his friends in the Chinese government told him they weren't. Good for @jonathanvswan for pushing back,' Hasan said.

"Given the realities of Pak-China relations, Imran Khan will never give a good answer to the question about his silence on the Uighurs. The best reply would be "we're very concerned, and we discuss it privately with our Chinese friends." But you'll never hear those first 3 words," Michael Kugelman, the Deputy Director of the Asia Program and Senior Associate for South Asia at the Wilson Center, tweeted.

Who are Uyghur Muslims?

Uyghur Muslims are a Turkic minority ethnic group originating from and culturally affiliated with the general region of Central and East Asia. It is now widely publicized that their human rights are crushed by China and they were sent to "re-education camps" by the communist regime in Beijing.

The Uyghurs are recognized as native to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China.

An American representative at the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination said in 2018 that the committee had received many credible reports that 1 million ethnic Uyghurs in China have been held in "re-education camps" by the Chinese authorities.