Smear campaign

Pakistan has rejected Indian media reports of any Pakistani involvement in the March 25 attack on a Sikh temple in Afghanistan in which 25 people had been killed. The attack had been claimed by the Islamic State terrorist group which has been fairly active in the war-ravaged country these days. The Indian media reports alleged that the ‘mastermind of the attack’ — Abdullah Orakzai alias Aslam Farooqi — arrested by Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security had ties with the Pakistani intelligence and also enjoyed ‘close relations’ with the Haqqani network and the Lashkar-e-Taiba.

The Foreign Office of Pakistan was swift to reject the “officially-inspired reports”, and described them as “mischievous and condemnable”. According to the Foreign Office, the news reports seeking to implicate Pakistan in this terrorist attack are part of a “well-known smear campaign against Pakistan” and represent “desperate attempts India is making to divert attention from its own unacceptable actions and state-terrorism in India-occupied Jammu & Kashmir”.

Given their track record, we know that any references to Pakistan in the Indian media have to be treated as false until proven otherwise. They have been doing it for long without a shred of evidence and without a fragment of proof. Even well-established media houses that are otherwise pretty independent in their treatment of issues are well-known to blindly accept whatever their government says in relation to Pakistan. The post-Pulwama reaction is a recent case in point. The Indian media got carried away with the national hysteria and tried to prove that a so-called revenge attack had led to 300 terrorists being killed on the Pakistani soil — as always basing their information to unnamed ‘official sources’, ‘forensic experts’ and ‘intelligence officers’.

However, just as the Foreign Office of Pakistan responded, “such Indian ploys will not succeed in misleading the world community”.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 9^th, 2020.

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