A top Pakistani diplomat has urged the world community to counter and defeat the “pandemic of disinformation”, as he deplored India’s systematic campaign to justify its decades-old suppression of the Kashmiri people struggle for freedom by depicting it as”terrorism”. “The international community should establish mechanisms through which India’s disinformation war against Pakistan, the people of Indian Occupied Kashmir and India’s Muslim and other minorities can be exposed and its sponsors held to account,” Ambassador Munir Akram told the General Assembly’s Third Committee, which deals with social, humanitarian and cultural matters, on Thursday.
“The digital age is in danger of becoming the disinformation age,” the Pakistani envoy said in a debate on human rights. “The exponential proliferation of disinformation, especially through on-line platforms and social media, has spread social discord; fostered hate speech, racism, discrimination, xenophobia, Islamophobia; and exacerbated competing nationalisms and inter-State tensions and conflicts.”
Among the most repugnant manifestations of disinformation is the State-sponsored campaign of disinformation promoted by the Indian Government to serve its strategic and ideological objectives, the Pakistani envoy said, adding that such disinformation is used systematically to justify the 70-year-old suppression of the Kashmiri people and to cover up the war crimes and crimes against humanity being committed in occupied Jammu and Kashmir.
Pakistan, he pointed out, has been a principal target of India’s disinformation campaigns for over three decades.
“Disinformation is also being utilized by the Hindutva-inspired Indian government to mobilize discrimination against and oppression of India’s 200 million Muslim minority,” Ambassador Akram said, referring to International Fact Checker Network’s observation that “sectarian communalism” was the biggest trend this year in that country especially disinformation against Muslims, including calls for genocide against them.
Much of India’s disinformation, he said, has been exposed by international and even by fact-checking portals in India. “We should develop an International Plan of Action to counter disinformation, on-line and off-line, in the public and private domain,” the Pakistani envoy said.
To this end, the Pakistani envoy urged the international community to establish institutional arrangements on interactions between States, media, and other stakeholders.
