News outlets in India have once more tried to push fabricated stories to whitewash New Delhi’s atrocities in Kashmir.
When it involves Kashmir, the Muslim-majority Himalayan region, where India has battled a well-liked uprising for many years , even fake news can have wide reverberations.
Over the weekend, Pakistan’s foreign ministry had to issue a politician denial to deal with a ‘news report’ that has been doing the rounds within the mainstream Indian media.
“Pakistan completely rejects concoctions supported “fake news”, during a section of the Indian media, alleging transfer of foreign fighters to Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK),” it said in a statement.
Both Pakistan and India have control over parts of Kashmir and that they see the opposite as an occupying force.
Since Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last year condemned New Delhi’s decision to revoke Kashmir’s nominal autonomy, Indian media outlets have targeted the Turkish leader relentlessly.
The latest episode unfolded after a Greek news website, Pentapostagma, published an unsubstantiated article that made an absurd assertion that Syrian mercenaries were being paid $2,000 to travel and fight in Kashmir.
The ‘news’ that first needed to be translated into English quickly inflamed passions within the nuclear-armed neighbours and archrivals.
News organisations like India Today and India.com, which went full-throttle in October over an imaginary war in Pakistan’s largest city of Karachi, were quick to draw far-fetched assumptions about Ankara’s military involvement in the region.
“India’s propaganda is rubbish and a crude plan to undercut Turkey’s political and diplomatic support for Kashmiris struggling against Indian oppression and tyranny. It won’t happen,” said Sardar Masood Khan, the President of the Pakistani side of Kashmir.
The Greek article made a conspiratorial connection between Kashmir’s homegrown militancy and therefore the recent Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Turkey has steadfastly backed its long-time ally Azerbaijan, a fellow Turkic country. Ankara supported Baku diplomatically and militarily especially with its drones which turned the tide in Azerbaijan’s favour.
During the 44-day war, a couple of reports alleged that Turkey-backed Syrian militias were fighting alongside Azerbaijani forces. Both Turkey and Azerbaijan denied the allegations.
But Pentapostgama made the wild assertion that since these Syrian fighters now have the experience of fighting within the Karabakh mountains, they will easily be transferred to Kashmir’s Himalayan terrain.
Greece and Turkey are hostile over the proper to look for oil and gas reserves within the eastern Mediterranean . Ankara says that the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus must even have a share within the petroleum bounty.
A jingoistic media frenzy
India has long accused Pakistan of training and sending militants to fight in the part of Kashmir under its control. Islamabad denies the allegations, saying that it's a homegrown insurgency fuelled by the brutality of the Indian military.
New Delhi has deployed quite 700,000 soldiers in Kashmir, which has seen multiple lockdowns within the past year.
In August 2019, the govt of Prime Minister Narendra Modi stripped Kashmir’s nominal autonomy, igniting street protests as Muslims feared the choice was intended to show them into a minority.
Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party has made an enormous show of the unilateral advance the disputed Kashmir region, emphasising how New Delhi has managed to isolate Pakistan and mute international condemnation.
Turkey is among a couple of nations which has begin strongly in support of Pakistan on the Kashmir issue.
As recently as September, President Erdogan called the matter a “burning issue” at the United Nations sessions, drawing praise from the Kashmiri diaspora which feels that India wants to avoid debate on the human rights violations there.
But Turkey’s position has obviously rubbed BJP-aligned news outlets the incorrect way as a series of anti-Turkey stories have appeared within the past year.
Quoting ‘intelligence reports’, the Hindustan Times reported in August that Turkey was luring Muslim students from India, especially Kashmir, to radicalise them and hand them over to Pakistan’s spy agency, the ISI.
A month later, Zee News ran a piece of writing about how Pakistanis are hired at state-run Turkish news outlets including TRT World. It didn’t mention that a lot of Indians also are employed within the same organisation at high positions.
It doesn’t stop there. Earlier this year, popular Indian actor Aamir Khan faced the ire of the Indian media when he met President Erdogan’s wife, Emine, during a visit to Istanbul.
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