Leaking Away (Updated)

Reading through the top story in today's The News and Jang, my eyes grew progressively wider and wider. Not so much from the latest Wikileaks revelations about India as from sheer incredulity.

 The News Karachi's front page today

Titled "Enough evidence of Indian involvement in Waziristan, Balochistan" (aside: how much is 'enough'?) in The News, the main story deals with a slew of information allegedly from US diplomatic cables sent from Delhi as well as other missions around the world about India. They confirm everything Pakistanis (or at least certain types of Pakistanis) always said about India: it's direct involvement of India in the anti-state activities in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Balochistan, the weakness of the Indian dossier on Ajmal Kassab, the manipulated nature of Indian evidence about the ISI's involvement in the Mumbai attacks, the sissyness of India's generals who do things out of personal ego and petulance rather than well-thought-out strategy, the internal rifts in the Indian army, the similarity of the situation in Kashmir with that in Bosnia in the 1990s, the involvement of Indian intelligence in promoting Hindu extremists to conduct false flag attacks against India itself to implicate the ISI and Indian Muslims etc etc etc.

 Jang's front page today

But I think where my incredulity reached a tipping point was when the cables claimed well regarded Indian policeman Hemant Karkare - who had been following leads about the involvement of Indian right-wing Hindutva organizations in the Samjhota Express bombing and about whose death there has already been plenty of controversy within India - was "eliminated in a pre-planned ambush during the Mumbai attacks", the implication being 'by the covert operatives of the Indian army.' According to the report in The News:

"The cable suggested that Hemant Karkare held a secret meeting with a senior US diplomat in New Delhi during the national day reception of a friendly country and briefed him about the gravity and the growing depth of the nexus between top Indian Army leadership and the militant Hindu fanatic groups. Karkare sought security for him and his family from the said American diplomat as he feared that the army and establishment would eliminate him as he intended to move further to expose the network. He had further briefed the said US diplomat that a former commander-in-chief of the Central Command of the Indian army, Lt Gen PN Hoon, was heading the militancy wing of the Hindu extremists and was getting full tactical, logistic and financial support from senior army officers. The day, Karkare was eliminated in a pre-planned ambush during the Mumbai attacks, a cable sent to the US read “we have lost an important link and a vital evidence”."

 

This was HUGE. This was BEYOND huge! Surely the world would be going mad with this new revelation!

Imagine my bewilderment then, when I turned to other papers and discovered that there seemed to be no mention of this story anywhere in any other Pakistani paper... not Dawn, not Express Tribune, not the Daily Times et al (Okay, so The Nation and Nawai Waqt did have it, but who believes anything they run?). Did the Jang Group and Majid Nizami's vanity projects just scoop everyone else? So I went online to check the Indian papers. No mention. Cowards. But what was really strange was that I couldn't seem to find these incredibly incriminating cables anywhere on the Guardian Wikileaks website or even mentioned anywhere in a Google News search.

In fact, the only other place which seemed to have the story were those redoubts of journalistic integrity, Rupee News and the Daily Mail Post type sites. Ah. And this absurd plant is your top story, Jang Group? Really?

Small wonder The News and Jang give the source of the report as "Agencies."

Question: How stupid do the "Agencies" really think Pakistanis are?


: : : UPDATE : : : 

So, the Express Tribune did in fact run a similar story. On page 8. Datelined Washington and sourced from the wire agency Online. I had mistakenly thought they had had better sense but it seems they didn't have much faith in the revelations to put them on the front page or somewhere else more prominent. Which of course begs the question, then why run them at all?

Incidentally, here is a link to the cheerleader Ahmed Quraishi's page, making the most of his imagination. And here is the Daily Mail Post basking in his reflected glory. Thanks to @Rezhasan and Shahid Saeed for the links.

Blowing Up A Story

The Commonwealth Games (CWG) about to begin in New Delhi in the next couple of days have received plenty of bad press, and most of it quite rightly so. From scandals about massive organizational corruption to poor construction and hygiene standards, the negative media reports have really tarnished the 'Shining India' image that the Indian government was hoping to send out to the world. And as several Indian commentators and social activists have pointed out, there is something intrinsically problematic about spending 2.5 - 6.5 Billion US dollars (estimates vary) on a media spectacle in a country beset by dire poverty and a host of other basic issues. As we know all too well in Pakistan, governments obsessed about projecting positive images of the country to the global media often do it at the cost of what should be real priorities.

But not all of the scandals around the Delhi Commonwealth Games are self-inflicted.

Remember that shocking story about an Australian Channel 7 reporter smuggling explosives into the CGW athlete's village to show the laxity of security standards at the venue? It reverberated across the world, and added to the chorus of voices demanding that the Games be cancelled. Well, as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's well-respected MediaWatch programme reveals, the story was not all it was cracked up to be. (Thanks to @alexlobov for guiding me to it.)

If you watch /read no other media takedown this week, do watch this to understand how media reports can be manipulated, to devastating effect. And also to understand why the Pakistani media is not the only one sometimes guilty of gross sensationalism. Incidentally the full transcript of the segment can be found here.





Don't you just wish there was an equivalent programme on our television screens? Until that time comes, however, you'll have to do with the net. In any case, I just loved MediaWatch's tagline, which I thought could have been written for us at Cafe Pyala too: "Everyone loves it, until they're on it."