Fifth Generation Warfare in South Asia and Indian Disinformation Campaign

The decades-long hostility between India and Pakistan has changed the regional security environment of South Asia. The Indian strategic quest for stretching its muscles over South Asia’s territorial and maritime affairs is the prime reason behind the South Asian intense security environment in which Pakistan has the potential to oppose Indian regional hegemonic designs. The partition of the subcontinent laid the foundation of India-Pakistan hostility because Indian leaders schemed to undo Pakistan’s creation while opposing its ideological creation. In response to the skyrocketing levels of Indian toxicities against Pakistan, Pakistan’s leading political authorities decided to adopt a defensive behavior for the security and protection of Pakistan’s autonomous and sovereign status in world politics. Moreover, New Delhi leaders started pursuing their ambitions for a regional hegemonic status by upsetting the sovereign positions of neighboring states which resulted in various disagreements with many territorially adjoining states. In this way, the combination of an unending antipathy towards Islamabad and the quest for attaining a dominating position in its home region formulated an aggressive stance for India in South Asia.

The Fifth-Generation Warfare (5GW) has become the most effective contemporary way of Indian warfare doctrine. Indian leaders have decided to undermine Pakistan’s social, political, and economic foundations by targeting its internal infrastructure. Under the broader conception of 5GW, Indian security officials set in motion an unending competition in the domain of information technology. In 5GW, a country tries to weaken the political structure by undermining the social loyalties of the people living under a legitimate government structure. The exploitation of the loopholes between the citizens and government starts bringing economic crisis in the targeted country, which later reduces economic support to the essential defence budget. An appropriate application of these principles can easily be seen in the form of Indian Anti-Pakistani policy, where the Indian leaders are determined to tarnish Pakistan’s national image in regional and extra-regional affairs. The aim of stigmatizing the soft image and a general perception of Pakistan through manipulating facts and propagating various information became the preferred strategies of New Delhi under the concept of 5GW.

Many international organizations have highlighted this Indian 5GW operations against Pakistan, consisting of propaganda, fake news, and factual lies. Such technological tactics against Islamabad have been primarily designed to serve the greater Indian interest in the international system while degrading Pakistan in the international community. As a result, these 5GW strategies have created an overwhelming wave of criticism of Islamabad’s position in regional and extra-regional affairs. The objective of downgrading Pakistan’s role in the world has started leaving negative impacts on Pakistani society. The critical debates on civil-military relations, efficient performance of the political leadership, effective economic policies of the government, and good governance issues have become major challenges for Islamabad in the international society. Due to the lack of effective cross verifying capabilities and the unexpectedly low literacy rate of Pakistani society, the India launched offensive operations in information technology have resulted in New Delhi gaining an influential role in the regional politics of South Asia. The growth of the Indian IT industry in cyberspace has further added fuel to the fire by using cyberspace as the most influential and most preferred tool for engaging Pakistan in information warfare. Indian strategic thinkers have developed different forms of disinformation operations against Pakistan, trying to push Islamabad at a disadvantageous position at national, regional, and global levels. After New Delhi’s multi-pronged propaganda strategy, the Indian security establishment created a worldwide web of fake news and inaccurate details about Pakistan and its social, political, and economic infrastructures. The quest for defaming Islamabad in the international arena was meant for the international community and its various multilateral frameworks.

A recent report of a European Brussels based organization, formally known as EU Disinfo Lab, pointed out the role of Indian propaganda strategies and their application against Pakistan. The EU Disinfo Lab is an independent non-profitable organization primarily working on tracing and tracking advanced and sophisticated disinformation campaigns targeting the EU, its member nations, its core institutions, and core values. The report published in December 2020 is primarily based on an initial investigation published on the same topic in 2019. The report Indian Chronicles unmasked an international web of Indian propaganda defaming Islamabad in the global forums generally and EU and UN particularly. To serve the greater Indian international interests in world politics, the clandestine web of propaganda consists of more than 750 media outlets in 116 countries, ten ghost-NGOs, 550 plus fake websites registered domain names, and a long list of phony journalists that were mainly used to spread the negative contents related to Indian adversaries. New Delhi’s disinformation campaign against its nuclear neighbour in the EU and UN has a fifteen years long history designed by the Indian security establishment to serve Indian interests in the international community. The 21 pages of this brief report provided a comprehensive survey of New Delhi’s Pakistan specific disinformation operations worldwide, revealing a widespread network of fake think tanks, media outlets, and NGOs producing different layers of disinformation against Islamabad. The coordinated web of dead media, fake think tanks and bogus NGOs was discovered by a Team of EU Disinfo Lab’s four investigators, Gary Machado, Alexandre Alaphilippe, Roman Adamczyk and Antoine Grégoire. An unimaginable level of fakery is based on an initial work of the Team documented as Influencing policymakers with fake media outlets, an investigation into a pro-Indian influence network.

The central theme of these Indian sponsored worldwide fakery campaigns revolves around discrediting those nations having conflicts with India in the larger Asian political order where China also remains a prime target of New Delhi but to a lesser extent. This disinformation lobby’s main objective is to promote pro-India, anti-Pakistani, and anti-Chinese feelings inside and outside India. Such propaganda tools are used to fundamentally improve Indian global standing by damaging the reputation of other states. Indian security establishment believes the stigmatization of rival states is an tool for gaining support of the great powers in world politics. The report Indian Chronicles attempted to maintain an inclusive account of New Delhi supported disinformation activities based on critical information about various sensitive matters. In the report, the European investigator’s Team pinpointed a coordinated approach between various ambiguous organizations, fake media outlets, bogus journalism personalities, and incorrect reports quoting and promoting each other at different global forums. In this way, the report of an independent European research organization revealed the actual global interest of the Indian government by turning the international community against Islamabad parallel to gaining maximum support of great powers. Based on the rationality and validity of research and on further analysis and findings of the EU Disinfo Lab report, it is easily maintained that the Indian government has become the biggest manufacturer of disinformation campaigns in order to achieve its strategic interest.

The report has validated Islamabad’s claims about India’s hostile attitude against its territorially adjoining nations generally and Pakistan and China specifically. In addition to opposing the regional and global standings of Beijing and Islamabad, the main purpose of New Delhi’s multi-pronged propaganda strategy is to portray the cooperative economic bilateralism between Pakistan and China negatively. Moreover, the spread of false facts and incorrect details of Pakistan’s domestic politics created various challenges at internal and external fronts for Islamabad. The combination of fake news structured on inaccurate information and false arguments based on manipulated figures about Pakistan’s domestic socio-economic and socio-political infrastructures was aimed at undermining Islamabad in world politics. The European investigation analysis maintained that Pakistan’s government is suffering from a holistic war posed by its aggressive nuclear neighbour. Leading political authorities from New Delhi have employed numerous platforms for spreading misinformation containing propagating contents against Islamabad. Apart from publishing manipulated stuff and bogus data from various media platforms in cyberspace, a long list of Indian web channels developed an online network of news channels. The promotion of such channels in the world of digital realities has further created a huge layer of fake journalists engaged in fabricating various political, social, and economic formats of bogus investigations. In addition to creating the fake journalists’ identities and their associations with ambiguous news networks, New Delhi’s propaganda campaigns have launched a massive operation of online social media accounts and their advertisement in cyberspace. The purpose is to heavily engage India’s phony media in critically examining Pakistan’s domestic affairs.

A state-sponsored questionable way of launching inaccurate information in cyberspace under the broader conception of 5GW has started misleading the general public of Pakistan parallel to violating Islamabad’s digital borders. Through developing its offensive capabilities in the field of 5GW, the Indian strategic community diminished the national image of Islamabad and tarnished the role of Pakistani political authorities inside and outside Pakistan, which resulted in a massive wave of criticism from inside and outside the country on Islamabad’s decision making bodies. Thus, the main sources of New Delhi’s disinformation campaigns constructed on evident-based research on information have become the most common and most preferred weapon of the Indian security establishment. The weaponization of critical information by New Delhi further degrades the soft image of the Muslim population living inside and outside India. Degrading the Muslim populations living in India, Pakistan, and Kashmir has further led New Delhi to criticize Pakistan’s ideological foundation and its sympathies to the Muslim communities in the nuclearized subcontinent. In short, the weaponized information containing fake arguments against Pakistan and its social, political, and economic infrastructures have become an active source of New Delhi’s antipathy towards Islamabad. In addition to degrading Islamabad’s position in its home region, the disinformation network targets the general public located in different parts of the world. In other words, the notion of 5GW has prevailed on Indian strategic thinking, and New Delhi has started planning offensive lobbying techniques to fulfill its regional hegemonic thirst by targeting Pakistan, which is the only South Asian country having sufficient potential for counterbalancing India in its home region. The European research organization’s report has unambiguously confirmed the role of India’s anti-Pakistan obsession and its continuation in the form of global disinformation operations. In the presence of an overwhelming wave of incorrect information cleverly structured and actively promoted by New Delhi, the global community needs to seriously reexamine their decision making process through verifying and investigating various sources of information emanating through Indian sources. Regarding South Asian politics, leading inter-governmental organizations’ decision-making bodies are required to calculate the impacts of their decisions based on Indian sources. The massive involvement of New Delhi in global disinformation campaigns should raise serious questions on New Delhi’s role and information it has provided on South Asian affairs. The international community that raises slogans of peace and stability in the nuclearized subcontinent must comprehend the actual face of Indian foreign policy and its aggressive designs in targeting Pakistan. An adequate understanding of Indian disinformation activities and their promotion across the globe has become a dire need because the vision of a peaceful and stable regional South Asian order is linked to India-Pakistan hostility. A greater responsibility lies with the international community which is very active in supporting its Indian-inclined South Asian attributes and after the revelation of New Delhi’s offensive regional policies against Pakistan, it can be maintained that India aggression against Pakistan has reached its zenith with the Indian security establishment progressing in the domain of 5GW, where Pakistan is India’s prime target.