Something very intriguing is going on in Pakistan, which could have been dismissed as amusing but for the seriousness with which even the supposedly mainstream media in that country is peddling the fake narrative of “India-backed terrorism”. A quick glance through articles written by even well-respected geopolitical analysts in the Pakistani press will invariably locate mentions of the ISI-inspired canard of “Indian terrorism”. This media narrative has to be seen as an extension of the sudden spurt in Pakistani activities to promote internationally the fiction of India being a terror-sponsoring nation. Its failure to do so in the Kulbhushan Jadhav case has not deterred Pakistan. Instead, its activities have gained momentum in recent months. Consensus is growing in India about this being a result of the additional push to such efforts being given by Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan’s “new” advisor on national security, Moeed Yusuf. Last year, Pakistan had gone to the UN to get four Indian nationals sanctioned as terrorists by the United Nations Security Council resolution 1267. All four names were knocked out by the sanctions sub-committee—two in September this year and two earlier. Not having learnt its lesson, Pakistan has now fielded its Foreign Minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi and the Director-General of Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR)—ISI’s publicity wing—Major General Babar Iftikhar to release a dossier with the most ludicrous allegations against India. Pakistan presented the dossier to the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, this week, and the buzz is that it will present it to the incoming Joe Biden administration in the United States as well. It is a different matter though that the dossier being presented is being trashed by diplomatic and intelligence circles as full of outlandish claims and factual errors—even spelling errors!—and hence without an iota of truth.
This push also can be seen in the context of the exercise in propaganda mounted by Pakistan, post India’s abrogation of Article 370 in August 2019, and the rhetoric that Imran Khan often indulges in comparing India with Nazi Germany. It has to be admitted that when it came to managing the messaging post the Article 370 move and the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act, the Indian government was rather late in realising that the narrative was getting hijacked, at least in mainstream western media, by the Pakistanis. In fact, Imran Khan went almost unchallenged in the US during his visit to the UNGA meeting in 2019, when he went around accusing India of the worst human rights crimes possible. The relative success that he got at least in the western media space, and also in a small segment of the US political space, would have emboldened him to believe that he can actually succeed in painting India as a terror state. But given the lack of interest even in the traditionally anti-India western legacy media, the whole exercise seems to have flopped—which does not mean that Imran Khan will stop trying. One of the main reasons he was selected as the Prime Minister by the military was the hope that he would be able to charm the West into getting Pakistan off the FATF grey list and loosen the purse strings of western nations and international institutions, apart from putting up a believable case against India on Kashmir and minorities. But the ageing playboy’s fading charm was not enough to rescue Pakistan, which continues to be on the FATF grey list. And now its economic situation is so grave that it had to run to the G20 this week to seek a debt relief of $800 million, in the company of 76 impoverished African countries—a G20, of which India is a part, and now the host of the 2023 summit! At least this should settle the case for those who still try to hyphenate India with Pakistan.
In short, Imran Khan has no choice but to continue with his ridiculous exercise against India, as that is one way of constantly burnishing his anti India credentials with the military, which is his boss. As the Opposition comes on the same platform of the Pakistan Democratic Movement, and mounts pressure on Imran Khan’s government, as well as on the military establishment, and as Pakistan slips into a state of penury, the anti-India noise will come in handy as a diversion to appease the domestic audience. Amidst this, even though Pakistan is at best an irritating sideshow for India, New Delhi should never lose sight of the fact the nuisance that Islamabad/Rawalpindi can be, especially when the latter has successfully sold to the Chinese the tall tale that it can be an effective counter to India.
Pakistan is a history sheeter, which has scorched its own record books by becoming the font of global terrorism and by perpetrating the worst kind of violence against its minorities. That Pakistan actually believes it can accuse India of all the crimes that it itself is guilty of, proves how highly this basket case of a country thinks of itself. It’s time it stopped punching above its weight.