On the night of 8 May, India launched a stunning offensive on Pakistan. Somehow slipping past the Pakistan Navy’s cordon, the Indian Navy managed to effectively destroy the economically vital Karachi port.

Pakistan’s air defences proved ineffective as Karachi’s airport had been levelled, but the southern port city, Pakistan’s economic capital, wasn’t the only target of this midnight blitzkrieg. 

The capital of Islamabad was also struck, and Lahore, perilously close to the Pakistan-India border, was within distance of Indian ground troops. 

No city was spared; Peshawar was bombed and, taking advantage of the situation, the Baloch Liberation Army captured Quetta, announcing to the world that Balochistan was now an independent country. 

The political repercussions were as immediate as they were inevitable: Pakistan’s powerful army chief, Asim Munir, was deposed in a coup and detained, having been singled out as being responsible for this debacle by his generals. 

This victory would have undoubtedly been considered as decisive as Hannibal's at Cannae, a defeat as resounding as Waterloo - if it had happened. 

The fact is that the only battleground where this offensive took place was in the studios of prime-time Indian television. 

But what of the footage displayed on Indian TV? Well, some of it was from a plane crash in Philadelphia, some of it was likely from Ukraine, and some was perhaps from Gaza. Where it wasn’t from, beyond a shadow of a doubt, was Pakistan.

Now, it took most of the world around an hour to fact-check this entire fiasco. It took me considerably less, given that I live in Karachi and only had to look out the window. 

The closest Karachi came to danger was when the famous Karachi bakery in the Indian city of Hyderabad was attacked by mobs of political workers affiliated with India's ruling party. 

As for the TV networks and journalists in question, only one channel offered what vaguely resembled an apology, with the presenter claiming that they were overloaded with breaking news, had too many reports to verify, and were somehow misled by AI deep fakes and social media. 

But this is less a "fog of war" - as the apology implies - than a "smog of war" because while the former is natural, the latter is very much man-made. 

And those working for the channels knew it. In a comical hot mic moment, a reporter from NDTV is heard saying that the newsroom is pressuring him for fresh updates, then the channel ends up running fake news, and then blames the reporter for it.

Media capture

So why would Indian media repeat lies that can so easily be debunked? And who is the intended target audience?

To answer that, we have to investigate the nature and contemporary origins of misinformation and disinformation in India, starting with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) infamous IT cell.

To its credit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his BJP party were quick to understand the power and potential of social media and how it could build narratives and discredit opponents.  

WhatsApp groups became a weapon of choice, given India’s surging mobile connectivity, smartphone use, and comprehensive 3G networks. While other parties stuck to the age-old methods of issuing staid statements at press conferences and corner meetings, the BJP contacted people directly.

One report from the Pulitzer Center characterised the BJP's use of WhatsApp as allowing the party to campaign "free from public scrutiny". 

The message, repeated over and over again in many forms, was that the BJP was the only bulwark against an amorphous and ever-evolving collective of enemies that would deny India its glorious destiny. Who were these enemies? Muslims, minorities, the Congress party, and other "internal enemies" such as dissenting activists and critical journalists.

India conflict, it increasingly seems that the disinformation merchants in India are riding a tiger from which they dare not dismount; having upped the ante to such a level and having amplified easily debunked misinformation to such an extent, they now find that any kind of pullback is impossible and are instead choosing to double down.

This is because, along with all their other activities, they have sold to the Indian public the image of an invincible India led by a superman who can do no wrong, who can commit no errors, and who can never, ever, show weakness. And it’s worked, but with the result that they have perhaps become victims of their own success.

Having successfully imprisoned large parts of their own public in a bubble of misinformation, they cannot let that bubble collide with the rock of reality. 

Websites and Twitter accounts that have fact-checked Indian claims or conducted objective reporting in the recent war have been blocked in India, with the number of such sites and accounts now numbering over 8,000. These include, but are not limited to, Pakistan-based media outlets. The net result is that the Indian public is trapped in an echo chamber where fiction is sold as fact by TV anchors who behave like WhatsApp forwards armed with professional studios.

A lie is repeated so often that it seems that for many Indians, it has become the truth.

To achieve this grand design, all methods of personal attacks and disinformation were allowed. The aim was to create, through repetition, an unshakeable narrative that would boost support for the BJP and push opponents onto the defensive. 

It worked beyond all expectations, and in 2018, then-BJP president and now Home Minister Amit Shah boasted to BJP social media volunteers, "We are capable of delivering any message we want to the public, whether sweet or sour, true or fake."

He illustrated his point with an example of an IT cell member who, at 8am , posted false news in a BJP WhatsApp group about a physical altercation between two senior members of a party opposed to the BJP. 

“It spread everywhere,” Shah told the jubilant crowd, “By 10 that day my phone started ringing… ‘did you know Akhilesh slapped Mulayam?’…. So the message went viral.”

Explaining the methodology, Shah revealed that every morning, cell members would post a message titled "know the truth", in which they would attack all the "false stories" that newspapers printed about the BJP.

“And it would go viral,” said Shah, “And whichever paper had carried these stories, ordinary people, and social media, would get after them: 'that's why you have printed lies, you should print the truth'. And by doing this, slowly, the media became neutral.”

By "neutral", Shah meant that voices even mildly critical of the BJP were slowly scared into silence by the avalanche of social media abuse, resulting in the social media tail wagging the mainstream media dog. 

Hungry for ratings and also potentially having imbibed the nationalist and communal narrative of the BJP, mainstream channels followed suit, parroting social media disinformation on mainstream channels.

One stunning example of this is when the coronavirus pandemic swept India, a malicious internet lie regarding Muslims deliberately spreading the virus quickly made it onto the airwaves.

Dubbed "Corona Jihad" by the media, it was quickly lapped up by a public already groomed to believe any such rumour, having been fed a steady diet of anti-Muslim content, such as "love jihad", "land jihad" and even "thook" (spit) jihad.

This was aided by the increased takeover of media outlets by pro-BJP business groups, such as when the Adani group bought the majority share in Indian news channel, NDTV.

Fuelled by victory, the infamous IT cells went from strength to strength, boasting of thousands of volunteers and paid employees, and quickly dominated India’s social media and messaging sphere.

The other parties were left stunned, fighting a digital war with analogue weapons.

Going global

It’s not for nothing, then, that India is now considered to be the leading source of Islamophobic content on the internet and is also, according to experts surveyed for the World Economic Forum’s 2024 global risk report, ranked highest for the risk of misinformation and disinformation.

But nothing succeeds like success, and at some point, the decision was made to use what had worked so well domestically on an international level.

In 2020, the EU DisinfoLab, an organisation dedicated to fighting disinformation campaigns targeting the European Union, launched a detailed report titled: "Indian Chronicles: Deep Dive into a 15-year operation targeting the EU and UN to serve Indian Interests."

It reveals how over 750 fake media outlets, covering 116 countries, were created. And defunct outlets like the EU Chronicles were "resurrected" along with launching new websites. Some of these sites would have names like the "Times of Geneva" to create an impression that they were European outlets, when in fact, their purpose was to "spread propaganda to promote India and demonise its perceived enemies, such as Pakistan and China".

To provide material for these sites, over 10 defunct non-governmental organisations that had once been accredited with the UN Human Rights Council were brought "back to life", mostly in name only or revived to some extent, and then these "zombie" NGOs were then cited and covered by the aforementioned manufactured "news" sites.

These were reinforced by entirely manufactured "human rights organisations" such as the European Organisation for Pakistani Minorities (EOPM), Baluchistan House and the South Asia Democratic Forum (SADF).

These ersatz NGOs would stage real-world anti-Pakistan demonstrations in Geneva and Brussels and were even given the floor at the UN Human Rights Council, where they would, as per the BBC, pursue "the same agenda of maligning Pakistan".

This then led to the real-world creation of "support groups" in the European parliament, which influenced European and international policymaking. These stories would be amplified by said fake news sites and then, the report notes, picked up and aired by India’s largest wire service, ANI.

One such NGO was the Commission to study the Organisation of Peace (CSOP), which received UN accreditation in 1975 but became defunct a few years later. Not only was it revived, but its former chairman, prominent law scholar professor Louis B Sohn, was listed as having participated in a 2007 UNHRC session and also at another event in Washington, DC, in 2011. Professor Sohn had, in fact, passed away in 2006.

The report directly traced the creation of this network, dubbed "the largest network we have ever exposed", to the Delhi-based Indian holding company, the Srivastava group.

Can this juggernaut be stopped?

But in the here and now, and especially after going into overdrive during the recent Pakistan-India conflict, it increasingly seems that the disinformation merchants in India are riding a tiger from which they dare not dismount; having upped the ante to such a level and having amplified easily debunked misinformation to such an extent, they now find that any kind of pullback is impossible and are instead choosing to double down.

This is because, along with all their other activities, they have sold to the Indian public the image of an invincible India led by a superman who can do no wrong, who can commit no errors, and who can never, ever, show weakness. And it’s worked, but with the result that they have perhaps become victims of their own success.

Having successfully imprisoned large parts of their own public in a bubble of misinformation, they cannot let that bubble collide with the rock of reality. 

Websites and Twitter accounts that have fact-checked Indian claims or conducted objective reporting in the recent war have been blocked in India, with the number of such sites and accounts now numbering over 8,000. These include, but are not limited to, Pakistan-based media outlets. The net result is that the Indian public is trapped in an echo chamber where fiction is sold as fact by TV anchors who behave like WhatsApp forwards armed with professional studios.

A lie is repeated so often that it seems that for many Indians, it has become the truth.

The implications of this are terrifying. We have seen the world over how easy it is to exploit racial, religious and ethnic tensions. In the British town of Southport, riots took place last year following a single piece of fake news.

In India, with a far larger and far more divided population, organised misinformation has the potential to cause bloodshed on a massive scale. And it has in the past.

These widespread and state-approved campaigns threaten the very foundations of what is often referred to as the "world’s largest democracy", as they create false perceptions that voters then take with them to the polling booth.

Another danger is that other parties in India could follow the BJP's example and act accordingly, aping the fake news ecosystem. Given its apparent success in India, malign actors around the globe will certainly see this as a role model.

It is difficult to say whether feeding an entire populace a diet of manufactured reality will work in the long term or whether it is indeed possible to fool most of the people most of the time in an age when information is so easily available. 

This likely cannot be sustained, but it is almost impossible to convince people that what they so fervently believe to be true and right is neither true nor right.

Because here’s the thing: when we read or hear a piece of information (as false as it may be) that jibes with our worldview, our brain releases dopamine as a reward, much like when a chain smoker takes a drag from a cigarette or an alcoholic sips a drink.

We feel good about it, and we want to know more about where that came from. So those who seek to fight this avalanche of misinformation should know that they’re not just fighting against ideology and technology, but also human biology. And that’s not an easy war to win.

( The article first was published in the Middle East Eye )