India’s Propaganda Machine and the Myth of the AJ Massacre
Most of us learned as children that you don’t throw stones when your own house is made of glass. It is not wisdom that requires a university education. A grandmother can teach him. A neighbor can demonstrate this by simply living next door with pride. This is one of those truths that is so obvious that only the truly reckless choose to ignore it.
India seems to have ignored it and made it a national sport.
Tune into Indian television on any random evening – pick any night, really – and the ritual plays out with the reliability of a broken clock that somehow still knows when it’s time to perform it. The seat changes. The anchor’s tie changes. The resulting anger depends on how frustrated the producer is feeling. But the story? The story never changes. It is always Pakistan. It is always Azad Jammu and Kashmir. In an editorial meeting that no one will ever openly admit to attending, it is decided that a day does not count unless something is said against Pakistan. Propaganda quota must be filled.
It would be easy to stomach if these were the same voices raised when their own country was bleeding.
They are not.
Ask them about Manipur. Since May 2023, more than 220 people have died in ethnic violence there – not in some remote conflict zone, but within India’s own borders. Women were filmed on camera, paraded naked through the streets. That footage did not disappear. It circulated for months. It took India’s own Supreme Court—publicly, reluctantly—to force the government to admit what was going on. Dock channels covered it, yes. In short. Uneasily. Then they moved on, on safe ground, back to Pakistan.
Ask them about Chhattisgarh, where Adivasi families have spent generations caught between Maoist militants and state security forces, their villages caught in a war that no one in Delhi seems in a hurry to end. Ask them about India’s illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir, where the United Nations has flagged grave human rights violations, where Amnesty International called the overnight abrogation of Article 370 a form of collective punishment, where the Armed Forces Special Powers Act means a soldier can kill and not face trial, and where hundreds of civilians—mostly young people—have been shot by security forces. The crowd
None of it gets prime time graphics. None of this gets a panel of twelve people yelling at each other for forty-five minutes.
So when trouble struck at Rawalkot, the cross-border machine did not pause to ask questions. Questions slow things down. Within hours, numbers were already being published with the confidence of eyewitnesses: According to one account, 200 people were killed by Pakistani army fire. 300, another correction, apparently felt to lack ambition in the first person. Affiliated social media accounts — many of which belonged to Indian networks — began pushing the clips. Some were staged. Some were pulled and reattached from completely unrelated events. All were moving in the same direction, telling the same story: Pakistan is burning its own people.
Here’s what actually happened.
The banned Joint Awami Action Committee, known as JAAC, launched a direct armed attack on the Combined Military Hospital in Rawalkot. They did this under the guise of a funeral — a procession for a young man named Shahzeb. Those who attacked did not look like grieving mourners. They were armed, coordinated and ready to fire. They opened up on law enforcement officers without hesitation. When the smoke cleared, four personnel had been martyred, three from the AJK Police, one from the Federal Constabulary. More than twenty others escaped with bullet wounds. Every wound from a bullet. Not a stick, not a rubber ball. a bullet
Now watch every video of that day. All of them have not a single confirmed clip showing Pakistani army personnel firing on civilians. Not one. What does exist — and what the international press is now beginning to highlight — are videos showing armed men, weapons visible, firing into the JAAC crowd. Journalists outside India are already asking the question that Indian anchors will never let near the microphone: Where is the proof that the security forces fired first?
The silence that greets this question says more than any answer.
People of Azad Jammu and Kashmir are not simple minded. They have seen JAAC leaders disappear—really disappear—the moment the situation turned dire, leaving only the young men they had wounded and pointed to the door of the hospital. These people know that 90% of JAAC’s demands have already been met. They are beginning to question what this organization was fighting for. The answer they are arriving at is not comfortable for JAAC.
Pakistan has said what it will do. Those who planned it, those who funded the weapons, those who made the calls, will be found. The law does not forget. And no armed faction, whatever its agenda, will control the peace of Azad Jammu and Kashmir.
As far as India is concerned, the glasshouse still stands. The rocks are still flying. But the cracks are widening, and the rest of the world is starting to see where they came from.
The post India’s propaganda machine and the myth of AJ’s massacre appeared first on Daily Pakistan English News.
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