Baseless claim

The report does parrot Indian propaganda; to paint Pakistan as unworthy of being removed from the FATF blacklist

The Foreign Office has rejected claims by an Indian think-tank that the Pakistani state was involved in alleged terror plots in Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir. We should also note that some reports attributed the claim to the Indian Army. However, the actual publisher of the report carrying the Indian think-tank’s claim is Bharat Shakti, a news outlet focused on the Indian defence industry, although it was prepared “with government input”.

A quick glance at the news outlet, although headed by an experienced journalist, shows that it is anything but impartial or accurate, as it claims to be, often publishing ultra-patriotic drivel and failing to criticise Indian government decisions, even when they are considered bad for the country’s own military. It is thus unsurprising that the ‘reporting’ and conclusions in this report largely fail to stand up to journalistic standards. The report tries to use as link the Pakistani nationality of a few militants directly with the Pakistani state, at one point even using cell phones, a sack of rice from Sargodha and some medicines in Pakistani packaging to show “a direct trail to the unabashed state-sponsored terror machinery operating from Pakistani soil”.

Other evidence, such as the fact that some of their weapons were Pakistani or Chinese-manufactured, are also weak — the Indian Air Force uses French aircraft, but Pakistan has never accused France of violating its airspace. Similar coincidental claims include the recovery of items and equipment that the Pakistani military and police also use. No mention is made, however, of the fact that the UN and several private companies in Pakistan and abroad also use the same equipment from the same manufacturers.  Not one of the claims made in the report credibly ties back to the Pakistani state or security apparatus having any involvement in the alleged attacks or offering any support to the men accused of being terrorists.

The only real food for thought in the report is that if the men involved in the incidents were indeed Pakistani then the security along the Line of Control, considered the world’s most militarised ‘border’, is still lacking, since Pakistani and Indian forces failed to stop the men from getting to Indian territory. But the report does again parrot the Indian propaganda line of trying to paint Pakistan as unworthy of being removed from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) blacklist, making several explicit references to the FATF that give away the purpose of publishing the propaganda rag.

 

Published in The Express Tribune, July 9^th, 2022.

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