Скачать или смотреть Indian Chronicles: A fake propaganda campaign of India against Pakistan

#DisinfoLab’s report a ‘deep dive into a 15-year operation targeting the #EU and #UN to serve #Indian interests’.

A #Brussels-based NGO working to combat #disinformation against the #European #Union has unearthed a 15-year-old operation run by an Indian entity that used hundreds of fake media outlets and the identity of a dead professor to target Pakistan.
The EU DisinfoLab in its report, Indian #Chronicles: deep dive into a 15-year operation targeting the EU and United Nations to serve Indian interests, termed this as the “largest network” of disinformation they have exposed so far.
The report released on Wednesday said the disinformation network run by the Srivastava Group, a New Delhi-based entity, was designed primarily to “discredit Pakistan internationally” and influence decision-making at the UN Human Rights Council (#UNHRC) and the European Parliament.
The report said in order to “undermine Pakistan internationally”, the network “resurrected dead NGOs” at the UN, impersonated the EU and laundered content produced by fake media to real media, and reached millions in South Asia and across the world.

The researchers said they had “uncovered an entire network of coordinated UN-accredited NGOs promoting Indian interests and criticising Pakistan repeatedly. We could tie at least 10 of them directly to the Srivastava family, with several other dubious NGOs pushing the same messages.”

“These UN-accredited NGOs work in coordination with non-accredited think-tanks and minority-rights NGOs in Brussels and #Geneva. Several of them – like the European Organization for Pakistani Minorities (#EOPM), Baluchistan House and the South Asia Democratic Forum (#SADF) – were directly but opaquely created by the Srivastava group,” it said.

In Geneva, the EU DisinfoLab report says, these think-tanks and NGOs are in charge of lobbying, organising demonstrations and speaking during news conferences and UN side events. They were repeatedly given the floor at the UN on behalf of the accredited organisations, the report said.

The International Institute of Non-Aligned Studies (IINS), a think-tank created by the #Srivastava Group in Brussels, organised trips for MEPs to #Kashmir, #Bangladesh and the #Maldives.

“Some of these trips led to much institutional controversy, as the delegations of #MEPs were often presented as official EU delegations when they were in fact not travelling on behalf of the Parliament,” the report said.

“Ever since we heard the visit of the European parliamentarians who came to Kashmir, we knew that there were attempts being made in Europe to organise some form of support for the [Prime Minister Narendra] #Modi government, which was not natural but instigated some way or the other,” said #Hartosh Singh Bal, political editor of The Caravan magazine.

The role of ANI

The European NGO has alleged that the ANI – which considers itself as South Asia’s leading multimedia news agency providing content to TV, newspapers, digital platforms and mobile apps – has played a big role in the disinformation network.
The DisinfoLab report says that fake media websites and NGOs run by the Srivastava Group lobbied members of the European Parliament to write op-eds taking pro-India stances, often against Pakistan or China.

The articles, the report said, were then published on the group’s dummy news websites which the ANI would quote as credible reports from the European media, from where the Indian media and news channels reproduced and disseminated them, often unchecked.

“The coverage – and often distortion – by #ANI of the content produced in Brussels and Geneva led us to the Big News Network and the World News Network – an entire network of 500+ fake local media in 95 countries that have helped reproduce negative iterations about Pakistan (or China),” according to the report.

‘Rogue Indian regime’

Reacting to the India Chronicles report, Pakistan’s Prime Minister #Imran Khan on Thursday said his country has consistently drawn the attention of the international community to India’s “subversive activities to undermine democracies in the region and export/fund extremism through structures of fake news organisations and bogus think tanks”.
“The revelations by EU DisinfoLab on the widespread Indian network of subversive activities vindicates Pakistan’s position and exposes its detractors,” Khan wrote on Twitter.

“The international community needs to take notice of a rogue Indian regime that now threatens the stability of the global system.”

“We also call on the United Nations to create processes that ensure that the international system is not manipulated through such influence operations,” Pakistan’s Foreign Affairs Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi told reporters in a news conference.