Ghost Report Claims Fall in Youth Militancy in Kashmir Since Abrogation of Article 370.

On the eve of 9^th February while helping a friend write short blog blurbs for an internship that she was doing, I came across a news story titled, ‘Number of Youths Joining Militancy in Kashmir Has Decreased: A Report’, that immediately caught my eye. Given the current climate in the country with Anti-CAA protests and many questioning the secular nature of our nation, the Kashmir issue continues to nag me at the back of mind; especially after the abrogation of Article 370 and consequent Internet blackout in the region. At a time when the region has been shut out from the rest of the country, news going in and out must be closely regulated to ensure that there isn’t spread of misinformation.

I skimmed through the report, not giving it much importance until I reached the end of it and realized that the article pointed out specific details of an unnamed ‘report’ by ‘security agencies’ without giving any hint as to where the story came from. The ‘report’ is allegedly a comparative study of military development before and after the abrogation of Article 370 and says that youth recruitments have gone down from fourteen a month to five a month after August last year. The article goes on to state that the number of deaths due to law and order incidents have gone down and that episodes of stone-pelting have also decreased. It supposedly points out that the large crowds that would earlier gather at the funeral of militants, where other youths were also recruited, have become a rare occurrence. The report mentions that the youth was encouraged to pick up arms and join militant organizations because of the last calls that trapped terrorists made to their families in distress. These call recordings would somehow make their way to the masses, hearing which the youth would get misled into picking up arms, the report states.

These calls have also allegedly decreased, partly because communication channels have been restricted in Kashmir since August last year. The report claims that an explanation for these changes is that ‘the scenario in Kashmir has changed since last year’.

Given the current climate of unrest in the nation, a report suggesting such developments should’ve been front-page news, however, my search only  found that several other online news publications had published the exact same article with different headlines. Most of these publications are only subsets of national dailies and no such report was published in any newspaper. The next day, when I searched the web again, I found that several more news blogs and publishers had posted the same article. All these websites and blogs named PTI as the source of this story. In two days, this story was trending on the webpages of major news sites, without naming any source or giving any attribution whatsoever.

On 11^th of February, I tracked down the first website to publish this article which was the website of  a local magazine of the region called ‘The Kashmir Monitor’; the piece was originally published on the 5^th of February by what was tagged as PTI. This same article was then republished by several news blogs on the 9^th of February, after which it was picked up several other major news publications.

Surely, a report of this magnitude would’ve found some mention in a press release on websites of government agencies. I looked for anything related to that article on the websites of the Press Information Bureau, the Ministry of Home Affairs as well the Government of Jammu and Kashmir, but the results came up empty.

As a student of journalism and media, we are taught that providing a source to the story is not imperative to add value to the story but also to legitimise it against the easily available rhetoric. Just like an argument in a courtroom, news must be backed by hard evidence to be accepted as a legitimate piece of news. However, the concept is not as familiar to the regular public and they usually believe the news published by their trusted publications and news dailies.  

A book I’ve been reading by Ryan Howard, outlines how news is traded up the chain from news blogs to bigger publications and even bigger publications without the news being checked for legitimacy; such news may not make it to the papers, but it causes enough damage by existing online.

The year 2019 was called ‘The Year Of Fake News’ by the Economic Times, and the year 2020 seems to be following in its footsteps. Unverified news articles making tall claims, especially on the web and broadcast news channels have become a regular feature in India. The one odd article may seem harmless but the reach of online news is extremely large and now online news has the ability to drive people’s opinions. News stories of this kind play their part in causing unrest by misguiding people and spreading misinformation in the country.

It is almost a month later, and even now this news remains unverified on the web playing it’s part of being a civil menace.