The ongoing tensions between Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan and his Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa over the appointment of the new director general of the spy agency ISI is testimony to the fact that two most important institutions of the country are no more on the same page.
Pakistan’s information minister Fawad Chaudhry keeps telling Pakistani media that everything is okay and his bytes are aired regularly on television channels. However, several senior Pakistani journalists, who have over the past three years turned to YouTube and started their own news channels to remain in touch with their audiences, have been doling out independent analysis.
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Similarly, large number of news-hungry Pakistanis are also now tuning in to YouTube channels to get information regarding the latest developments that are taking place, by the hour, in Rawalpindi’s GHQ and Bani Gala, the residence of the prime minister. Generally speaking, Pakistani public no more seems to trust the handful of popular television news channels.
It is in this backdrop that the federal minister of information and broadcasting Fawad Chaudhry called a press briefing on October 15. He talked about a (imaginary) fake news apparatus based in India that according to him was responsible for spreading rumours and disinformation about relations between the Pakistan Army and its government.
Fawad Chaudhary fell short of giving an example of a single rumour or piece of disinformation that Indian channels might have circulated. Although he named Asian News International (ANI) and WION, but again he could not present any such piece of news as evidence that was ever shared by the aforesaid news outlets that could be categorized as fake.
Pakistan has been targeting the ANI for quite some time now. Each year, at the UNHRC session held in Geneva, it is the ANI journalists who meticulously gather and share information regarding human rights violations taking place in Pakistan, China and other countries. The information collected by news agencies in Geneva is then structured as a news story along with testimonies and interviews of those who are in attendance at the UNHRC session.
There is no such institution in India that manufactures or even guides the news media to follow a certain narrative. Each media house is independent in broadcasting news of its choice. Hence, we have dozens of TV channels that criticise the government on a daily basis. Media houses are free to pick their sides without any hindrance. They are free to support certain anti-government campaigns or otherwise.
The situation of media in Pakistan or for that matter in Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK) and Gilgit-Baltistan (GB) is another story. Pakistan has Press and Publications Department and Pakistan Electronic Media Authority (PEMRA) that bound Pakistani media to perform inside the ideological (read Islamic) boundaries of the country. Media has to follow the anti-India (read Hindu) communal narrative and promote a totally false storyline regarding Kashmir, which is that India and not Pakistan is the occupier of Kashmir.
Now the sitting government of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf is attempting to pass a bill to establish a Media Development Authority. The purpose of this bill is to add even more strict clauses to the already besieged media in the country. I have used the word besieged because any journalist who sleepwalks out of the ideological parameters set by the government (read military establishment) is taken to task.
Hamid Mir from Geo television got the sack at the behest of the government, Matiullah Jan, another outspoken journalist based in Islamabad, was kidnapped, and Asad Ali Toor, a critic of the ‘government’, was paid a violent home visit by a few bouncers who according to Toor claimed to be from the ISI.
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Every day Pakistani media houses send their representatives to a place in Rawalpindi. The location is commonly referred to as Gate No. 3. It is one of the five entrances at the Army headquarters, known as the GHQ, which leads to the office of the Inter Services Public Relation department, branded as the ISPR. It is from this office that the ‘government’ hands out media guidelines for the day to print and broadcast media. The guidelines from the ISPR are followed loyally. Sometimes they are even followed to the last letter. To back my claim, I would like to present to you an example that would demonstrate three things.
First, it will reveal that the news has come from the same source; second, it will elaborate on the lies that the news item is spreading among the population of Pakistan and PoJK/GB; and finally, that the publishers did not even bother to edit its text to conceal its source.
On October 13, two competing Urdu dailies published from PoJK printed a three column news item on front page. One daily’s headline read, ‘Military Siege and Curfew of Occupied Kashmir Completes 800 days. Pasban e Huriyat Conducts Protest in Muzaffarabad’. (Sada e Chinar, October 13, 2021). The other daily’s news item reads, ‘Siege of Kashmir Completes 800 days, Pasban e Huriyat Conducts Protest in Muzaffarabad’. (The Kashmir Express, October 13, 2021).
Recognisably, the language of the headlines has the same source. Both mention 800 days and Pasban e Huriyat, which is an ISI-sponsored outfit in PoJK. Both media houses did not think twice before publishing a fabricated news item, since there is no siege or even curfew in the Valley. And finally, the headline similarity is uncanny.
Folks, this is a living example of fake news and disinformation spread day in and day out by Pakistan’s military establishment’s media outfit ISPR. And the Pakistani information minister has the cheek to accuse India of spreading fake propaganda against the rogue state. Perhaps, Fawad Chaudhry’s press briefing was also dictated by people operating from behind Gate No. 3.
Dr Amjad Ayub Mirza is an author and a human rights activist from Mirpur in PoJK. He currently lives in exile in the UK. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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