Unseen war by India against Pakistan a major challenge: Farrukh Habib

Islamabad : Farrukh Habib, State Minister for Information and Broadcasting, has said that India’s official news agency has now become a mouthpiece of BJP consistently spreading false and misleading information about Pakistan.

Habib was speaking at a panel discussion on ‘India: the largest democracy or a fake union?’ organised here by the Institute of Regional Studies. Dr. Salma Malik from Quaid-i-Azam University moderated the session.

The Minister said that it was the very reason the Sikh community is demanding separation from India. Referendum by Sikhs in this regard clearly demonstrates the Sikh community’s resolve to have a separate state for them where they could enjoy religious, political and social freedom, he stressed.

He said that even pro-Indian Kashmiri leadership in the Occupied Kashmir expressed its anger over New Delhi’s unilateral action of sabotaging Kashmir’s autonomy.

He told the participants that the Muslim girls in India especially in Gujrat, Rajasthan, and Karnataka were not feeling secure after the incidents of harassment cases of hijab-wearing girls. He said that Pakistani youth, academicians, journalists, and people from all walks of world.

Former ambassador Asif Ali Khan Durrani said that the very foundation of India was secular and literally non-religious in its entirety. He said that Articles 25 to 28 of the Indian Constitution provide all its citizens a right to practice their own religion. He argued that the Indian Constitution kept the people united for a very long time but today the situation changed altogether. He also said that the Babri mosque was the symbol of religious freedom and equality in India that was unfortunately succumbed to hyper-nationalist forces.

He warned that rising racism in India would further consolidate polarisation in Indian polity and society which ultimately affected the whole region in a considerable manner. Durrani said that India could be everything but not a democracy as it is an autocracy.

Dr Arshi Saleem Hashmi from National Defence University argued that a kind of autonomy that Indian unions were enjoying had significantly gone down in recent years. Today, the Centre is overstepping states’ authority by passing resolutions that constitutionally come under states jurisdiction, she added. She warned that the unprecedented rise of the corporate-Hindutva alliance that was basically engineered to prevent indigenous revolts against India’s racist policies, was bringing a major shift in political discourse wherein the opposition parties were finding it hard to promote their traditional ideological manifestations.

Syed Muhammad Ali from the Centre for Aerospace & Security Studies (CASS) said that India’s massive investment in building a global information network in the last fifteen years made it able to not only hide but also justify its racist policies to the world. It was also because of India’s information rampage the US was compelled to realise the Chinese threat to Indian soil which ultimately resulted in enhancing military cooperation between Washington and New Delhi, he added.