How Pakistan is using media to deny India’s surgical strikes

India has rubbished a report published in a Pakistani newspaper, which claims that India has not conducted any surgical strikes in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir after the Uri terror attack. According to the report published in News International, “an informed official source” told Pakistani officials in Berlin that “the Indian Foreign Secretary has categorically denied and said that there was no ‘surgical strike’ undertaken by Indian Army inside Azad Kashmir.” India has rejected the report as completely baseless and a politically motivated story by Pakistan to shore up its image after India’s surgical strikes.

Retaliating against the Uri attack, India conducted targeted terror camps in POK which are backed by the Pakistani forces. The Indian attack was widely appreciated as an apt response to the deadly terror attack which killed 19 Indian soldiers. The international community termed it as a case of cross-border terrorism and backed India in the fight against terrorism. Upset by the response of the international community, Pakistan has denied the strike and termed it as just another cross-border firing. In a bid to prove this point Pakistan invited a large number of journalists to visit the place where India carried out the strikes.

The politics around the surgical strikes is not dying down and getting murkier with each passing day. Pakistan’s powerful military establishment is using the Pakistani media to project that the surgical strikes by India were just propaganda. The announcement of the surgical strikes by New Delhi has led to a proliferation of fanciful stories in Pakistani media outlets that suggest the desperation of its military elite in getting back at their arch rival, India.

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