ISLAMABAD: Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi on Monday said thatIndia’s smear campaign against Pakistan had no limits as the neighbouringcountry had even misused prestigious international institutions, includingthe United Nations, for its nefarious designs.
“Members of European Parliament were duped, disinformed and unabashedlymanipulated” and “think-tanks, researchers and even students were used aspawns to peddle Indian fallacies,” the foreign minister said addressing theconcluding session of a seminar on ‘Disinformation as a Tool of StrategicWarfare’ organised here by the Institute of Regional Studies (IRS).
Referring to the recent report of EU Disinfo Lab titled ‘IndianChronicles’, he shared that the government of Pakistan had called upon theinternational community to take due cognizance of India’s systematicdesigns to damage Pakistan’s image and international standing.
Qureshi said that he had written to the EU High Representative, asking himto make India accountable for its misdeeds that had been unearthed by anindependent not-for-profit organization funded by the EU itself.
Qureshi said that Pakistan’s Permanent Representative to the UN in New Yorkhad written to the chair of the NGO committee in ECOSOC to de-register the10 fake NGOs (non-governmental organisations) identified in the *IndianChronicles*.
He viewed that the *Indian Chronicles* had revealed the real face of Indiaand its hate for Pakistan, and termed maligning Pakistan an article offaith for the Bharatiya Janata Party- Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (BJP-RSS)dispensation in New Delhi.
Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs Andleeb Abbas enumerated threechallenges of countering disinformation in the 21st century as follows:
1. The use and abuse of information technology; 2. The reality of the post-truth world where facts were constructed and misconstrued; 3. The inability of international institutions to adapt to this new reality of fake news.
Senator Mushahid Hussain Syed called for busting of myths about propaganda,stating that such misinformation and fear-mongering tactics were onlylinked to dictatorships. It was only employed in a situation of war, and itwas only orchestrated through state-controlled media, he maintained.
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He said that India’s disinformation campaign against Pakistan was a newform of international aggression because it was conducted for 15 years tomalign a neighbouring country against which India did not have activehostilities.
Pakistan’s former ambassador to China Masood Khalid said that fake newstravelled faster than true news through social media and this called forgreater regulation of social media platforms.
He condemned Indian tactics of spreading falsehoods about theChina-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).
Professor Glenn Diesen of the South Eastern University of Norway, whoaddressed the seminar virtually, stated that while the attempts by statesto promote a national narrative were not new, international redistributionof power and the emergence of new technologies had emerged more recently.
Internal Revenue Service (IRS) President Ambassador Nadeem Riyaz urged thegovernments and people to work together to ensure that people andgovernments were not led astray with fake news, propaganda, and falsenarratives.
It could only be safeguarded with news literacy, high-quality journalism,and social responsibility, he added.
Parliamentary Committee Chairman on Kashmir Shehryar Khan Afridi, ProfessorAthina Karatzogianni of the Leicester University, Air Cdr (r) KhalidBanuri, defence analyst Lt Gen (r) Naeem Lodhi, political analyst Dr HumaBaqai, Professor Shahab Enam Khan, Pakistan’s former permanentrepresentative to the UN in Geneva Ambassador Faruk Amil, Professor ofInternational Relations at the NESA US Dr Hassan Abbas, columnist andpublic policy professional Mosharraf Zaidi, Pakistan’s former permanentrepresentative to the UN in Geneva and Ambassador Zamir Akram alsoaddressed the event.
