Daily Times

Nobody is surprised at all that just two days after the second anniversary of India’s illegal and unconstitutional abrogation of Kashmir’s ‘special status’ and its subsequent inhuman suppression of basic rights across the valley, and the noise Pakistan and Pakistanis made across the world to remind it of its blissful ignorance, Indian media is breaking stories about security officials warning about an imminent “infiltration” of the Line of Control (LoC) from the Pakistani side. This is exactly the card that Delhi played after the first anniversary a year ago, which is no surprise because this is what it always does whenever international headlines begin to turn to the real side of the story.

It is also no surprise, sadly, that each time it is able to get away with such antics with a lot of ease because it has got powerful international opinion in its pocket simply because of the pull of its huge consumer market. That is why now, just as always, sections of the international press will breathe hot air into this accusation and then the same old show will go on. The Pakistani foreign office has done the right thing to point out, while rejecting India’s insinuations of course, that it was only last year that India’s “smear campaign” against Pakistan was “fully exposed” by the EU DisinfoLab in its investigative report titled Indian Chronicles. The ‘Brussles-based EU DisinfoLab had uncovered a vast network of 265 coordinated fake local media outlets in 65 countries serving Indian interests, as well as multiple dubious think-tanks and NGOs’, according to a leading local newspaper.

Despite all the constraints though the Pakistani government is doing the right thing by rising this issue, along with facts and figures, at all important international forums. The strategy seems to raise awareness of it to the point that people in all advanced countries begin questioning their leaders about their blind-eye approach towards it. Therefore, for Pakistan to wake up to outrageous Indian allegations at such times is not new. In fact we are just being made witness to the fact that the people of Kashmir are marking yet another anniversary of yet another catastrophe and the world is still looking the other way because there’s so much money to be made in the Indian market. So what else is new? *