According to the pictures of the formal event, which was held on Saturday to “honour the political leadership, steadfast commitment of the armed forces, and the indomitable spirit of the people of Pakistan as demonstrated during Marka-e-Haq, Operation Bunyanum Marsoos,” Pakistan’s recently promoted Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir hosted a lavish dinner.
This event, which was attended by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari, as well as a number of high-ranking political figures and army generals, came after Sharif declared that May 10 would now be celebrated annually as the Youm-e-Marka e Haq [Day for the Battle for Truth], which Rawalpindi unilaterally declared to be an unqualified military victory.
In addition to being a face-saver, Field Marshal Munir’s plan to show Sharif a framed picture of a salvo of Pakistani rockets being fired during Operation Bunyanum-un-Marsoos was an attempt to cover up the fact that there was no photographic proof to back up Pakistan’s claims that it had severely damaged the Indian military. Do you recall when Khwaja Asif, the defense minister for Pakistan, claimed that five Indian Air Force jets had been shot down and used “social media” to support his claim?
Regretfully, the image that the Field Marshal showed the Pakistani Prime Minister was actually a replica of a 2019 image that Huang Hai was credited with taking, showing China’s PHL-03 multiple rocket launchers firing during a PLA military drill. In addition to convincingly confirming the old adage that images lie but cameras do not, Field Marshal Munir’s terrible gaffe highlights Pakistan’s tendency to shamelessly promote lies.
That being said, Islamabad has already used photo piracy to deceive the public. Readers may remember that in September 2017, Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistan’s then-permanent representative to the UN, showed a picture of a young girl’s severely scarred face. She claimed the girl was a Kashmiri who had been hurt when Indian police fired pellet guns on protesters.
Her dramatic attempt to exploit the picture of a girl who was seriously hurt as evidence of “Indian brutality” in Kashmir to get the attention of the world community failed since her claim was untrue.
As it turned out, this picture was taken by award-winning photographer Heidi Levine and featured a 17-year-old Palestinian girl who was hurt in an Israeli attack in 2014 rather than a Kashmiri.
Unfortunately, despite this enormous humiliation, Islamabad did not take any lessons from it.
Pakistan issued a set of 20 stamps titled “Atrocities in Indian-Occupied Kashmir” the very next year. The words “Missing Persons” are printed on one of the stamps in this series, which depicts a gathering of demonstrators, giving the idea that they were demonstrating against the disappearance of Kashmiris who were purportedly taken by security forces. However, the image used in this stamp was also plagiarized, much like the one that Field Marshal Munir showed to Sharif and the one that Lodhi flashed at the UN.
According to a fact-check, the image on the disputed stamp was taken from a picture that was given credit by the Press Trust of India. Shirish Shete took the photo on January 19, 2014, during a nonviolent demonstration by Roots in Kashmir, an ethnic Kashmiri Pandit group commemorating the 24th anniversary of the community’s forced migration from the Kashmir Valley by Islamic terrorists supported by Pakistan, at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi.
Surprisingly, Islamabad attempted to pass off video game footage as real battle filming even during the most recent Indo-Pak standoff. “The official account of the Government of Pakistan has posted footage from the video game ARMA 3, claiming it shows a real military response to alleged Indian aggression,” UK Defence Journal, an independent defense news and analysis website, wrote in a comment on “X,” referencing the video that Islamabad had stolen.
The question of whether Islamabad truly thinks it can deceive the world community with such naive claims is raised by the repeated deployment of such childish ploys. For the simple reason that Pakistan’s diplomatic corps and the army’s media wing, Inter Services Public Relations [ISPR], are not a group of idiots, the response is a resounding “no.” However, why do Islamabad and Rawalpindi continue to tell their “fairy tales” if they are aware that the world is not impressed?
It is commonly known that Rawalpindi, not Islamabad, is in charge of Pakistan’s disinformation campaign. The target audience for the army’s propaganda is the Pakistani people themselves, not the foreign community, because Rawalpindi zealously defends its territory and the extra-constitutional powers it has. It may sound strange, but a neutral investigation will undoubtedly support this conclusion.
World leaders may not be impressed by clumsy initiatives such as shamelessly stealing photos or stealing video game clips and passing them off as real battle footage. But it does wonders for the naive masses in Pakistan, who have been quietly indoctrinated to think that any conflict between India and Pakistan is fundamentally a “jihad” or conflict between Islam and Hinduism. Furthermore, this claim is supported by Field Marshal Munir’s recent tirade about the irreconcilable existential incompatibility between Muslims and Hindus.
In addition, DGISPR Lt Gen Ahmed Sharif, who is said to be the son of a UN-designated global terrorist, freely acknowledged that “Jihad drives us; it is not merely part of our personal belief, but central to our institutional faith and training” during his May 11 press briefing on Operation Bunyanum Marsoos. “We have an army chief who has a strong belief in it,” he continued. Different operations result from the leadership’s convictions and dedication. Whether these revelations were intended for the home audience or the global community is up to the reader to choose.
Therefore, it is abundantly evident that Rawalpindi’s efforts to control perception are only directed at the naive Pakistanis who have already been radicalized by the potent combination of intolerance and hyper-nationalism that they have been exposed to over the years. This is what important to Rawalpindi, and it guarantees precisely that.
The photograph that Field Marshal Munir sent to Shehbaz Sharif is unquestionably worth a thousand words, as evidenced by the thousand-word essay it inspired!
