SHAHBAZ Sharif’s call for peace between Pakistan and India is a whiff of fresh air. Earlier Indian Prime Minister Modi shook hands with our president at Shanghai Cooperation Organisation conference. Indian diplomats themselves have iterated that peace come with small steps.

To promote peace, India should stop its propaganda against Pakistan. Some Indian reports are tell-tale that they are obviously sponsored by Indian intelligence agencies.

A basic principle of Machiavellian disinformation is ‘never lose sight of truth’. A twisted truth is often more effective than a stark lie. Sometimes, it is even better to hide a truth than to tell a lie. Hitler’s propaganda theorems are included in US-published political science text books. The Nazi believed ‘the bigger the lie the more it will be believed’.

Pathological lying, as on Indian channels, is not the art of disinformation. Psychologists would tell that, even under stress, a mature person would suppress the truth rather than tell a lie. Richard Deacon says: ‘Truth twisting…unless it is conducted with caution and great attention to detail, it will inevitably fail, if practiced too often… It is not deliberate lie which we have to fear (something propaganda), but the half-truth, the embellished truth and the truth dressed up to appear something quite different’.

The role of India’s foremost intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), in conducting disinformation campaigns has, by and large, remained hidden from Pakistani media watch. RAW’s disinformation campaign, often borders on lying.

Deeba Malik
Rawalpindi

Published in Dawn, June 26th, 2018