The EUDisinfoLab had revealed an India-sponsored fake, dis-informational network of 265 fake media outlets in 65 countries, including US, Canada, Brussels, and Geneva. Identity of a dead human-rights activist was also resuscitated. Unruffled by EU DisinfoLab expose, India’s premier intelligence agency has minted a new piece of disinformation to tarnish Pakistan’s image and sow seeds off discord in the Afghan peace process. The canard being trumpeted in media is that the Inter-Services Intelligence of Pakistan is planning to mix poisons in dairy products being exported to Afghanistan. A handwritten `official letter’ reveals that the dairy products are part and parcel off the Afghan security forces.
An interesting feature of the letter is that it has remarkable similarity with a similar `news’ that Indian media hollered shortly after the Pulwama incident. In the post –Pulwama news also India blamed Pakistan for poisoning milk exported to India and used by Indian troops in the occupied Kashmir.
Sophistication
To create an aura off credibility, India’s top analyst Sheikhar Gupta in his Youtube channel argued that the ISI has no scruples in killing people it considers undesirable. It blamed the ISI for Baloch activists Karima Baloch and Sajid Hussain’s murder abroad.
Multiple objectives of the Afghanistan-related disinformation
Afghan peace: With one piece of misleading news, India wants to achieve several objectives. It wants to sabotage or at least delay the Afghan peace process until India is embedded in peace talks.
Scuttle Pakistan’s efforts to restore trade with Afghanistan:
Afghanistan was Pakistan’s second-biggest export destination after the United States until 2011. Now, China holds this position, followed by the United Kingdom and Germany.
In the past 20 years, trade relations with Afghanistan were at low ebb with frequent border closures. Torkham border-crossing point and other routes used to be closed abruptly for security reasons. The traditional exports of wheat flour, clothes, red meat and medicine ended for good. Afghanistan used to import $500 million worth of medicines. Now it imports them from Turkey, India, Bangladesh, Russia and other European countries. The routes used included the Indian-sponsored Chabahar port in Iran and the Lapis Lazuli Corridor linking Kabul with Europe via Turkmenistan and Turkey.
Imports from Pakistan dropped from around $3 billion a couple of years ago to little over $1 billion now.
With improvement in indo-Afghan relations, Pakistan opened Ghulam Khan crossing point linking Khost province of Afghanistan with the North Waziristan of Pakistan opened last week.
Thousands of Afghans, who used to visit Peshawar for medical treatment, began to prefer travelling to India.
A bird’s-eye view off some old disinformation pieces
RAW occasionally dishes out innocuous-looking news that appears, from time to time, in Indian media. Examples of such news, attributed usually to foreign sources, are: (a) Pakistan aids Saudi Arabia’s nuclear programme. Yet, it bugged royal visitors’ conversations during their stay in Pakistan, (b) Kashmiri Mujahideen are in possession of stinger missiles, (c) Bangladesh and ISI are hands in glove to foment secessionist movements in India’s north-eastern region (d) Pak ISI is not only training Kashmiri Mujahideen, but also imparting training to ‘disgruntled Muslims to wage a proxy war…The recruits are given basic military training…computer training, and training in bomb making and electronic circuit making (India Today dated September 29, 2003). Interestingly, the magazine portrayed even Tableeghi Jama’at (a pacifist organisation) as a militant organisation! (e) Al-Qaeda members are hiding in Pakistan-controlled frontier region. Bin Laden used steganographic skills (encryption) through music and pornographic pictures to carry out his ‘terrorist and drug trafficking’ activities. Indian stooges ‘heard him talking to the Taliban about heroin exports and even monitored him talking to his mother.’ .
The RAW’s great feat is that it got Dawood declared a global terrorist (Indian Express dated October 17, 2003) without any strictures concerning Chota Rajan, who became a RAW agent reported .
“The weakest link in the Mumbai-blasts investigation is that there is no evidence, except hearsay, to corroborate link between the Syed family, accused of triggering the blasts and Dawood” (page 36, India Today dated September 22, 2003.
Faux pas
Linking Pakistan’s dairy products to Afghan troops or Indian troops in occupied Kashmir appears to be a bit farfetched possibility. RAW needs to be less over-ebullient in lying.
Tzu’s and Kautliya’s principles were used not only in the World War II but also in the Cold War period.
A basic principle of disinformation is ‘never lose sight of truth’. A half-truth or even .005 per cent to 5% untruth, a twisted truth, or sometimes a truth concealed may appeal more to readers or viewers than a stark lie. Goebels or Hitler is not alive to tell that he never said ‘the bigger the lie the more it will be believed’. Pathological lying is not the art of disinformation. Psychologists would tell that, even under stress, a mature person would suppress truth rather than tell a lie.
Richard Deaconsays, ‘Truth twisting…unless it is conducted with caution and great attention to detail, it will inevitably fail, if practiced too often… It is not the deliberate lie which we have to fear (something propaganda), but the half-truth, the embellished truth and the truth dressed up to appear a something quite different’ (The Truth Twisters, London, Macdonald & Company (Publishers) Limited, 1986/1987, p. 8).
He gives several example of disinformation including sublimininal disinformation by which the truth can be twisted so that the distortion is unconsciously absorbed, something which both television and radio commentators have subtly perfected’.(Ibid. p. 9).
Conclusion
It appears India, at times becomes over-ebullient in acting upon Hitler’s anachronistic propaganda-theorems: `The bigger the lie, the better the results. It is engaged in Kautliya koota yuddha (unprincipled warfare) and maya yuddha (war by trickery) against Pakistan.
