Days before Pakistan’s ritual 5 August statement against India, its own military spokesperson revealed what actually animates Islamabad’s worldview. Lt Gen Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry — the Pakistan Army’s Director General of Inter-Services Public Relations, its official voice — went on record over Afghanistan’s warming ties with India. Muslims, he said, invoking the Quran, should not take “kaafirs” as friends — a word meaning infidel or non-believer.
This is not a fringe cleric or a rogue post online. It is the Pakistan Army’s chief spokesperson, reaching for the language of religious bigotry as his sharpest available line of argument. The statement which was made in the context of relations between the Indian government and the Afghan Taliban—an organisation that Pakistan supported, nurtured and sheltered for decades—exposed the explicitly communal nature of the Pakistani Army. Coming from a senior spokesperson, the language was particularly striking, openly invoking religious identity in commenting on India’s relationship with Afghanistan.
And it lands at a moment when the state has rather more pressing things to explain: its own forces have been shooting civilians in Pakistan occupied Jammu and Kashmir for weeks, an armed independence movement persists in occupied Balochistan, its northwest along the Afghan border remains a live conflict zone, Sindh has its own currents of unrest, and the press is being squeezed tighter by the month.
Confronted with all of that, the best the institution could produce was communal invective — which says a great deal about what ails this artificially assembled state. It also helps explain why, despite decades of billions in aid and financing from the United States, China, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar, Pakistan remains financially threadbare: on its 24th IMF programme since 1958, and only months ago drawing $3 billion from Saudi Arabia to shore up reserves strained by a $3.45 billion repayment coming due to the UAE.
While Shehbaz Sharif’s government claimed on 5 August to speak for Indian Kashmiris, Pakistani Rangers and police were firing on Kashmiris under its occupation. Disputed local elections and long-standing grievances over the cost of living and self-government tipped into weeks of unrest around Muzaffarabad, Rawalakot and Mirpur. The death toll climbed steadily through the crackdown — reported at 22 in the standoff’s early days and past 40 within a fortnight, with reports continuing to mount. Islamabad’s response was to proscribe the protest group under anti-terrorism law and have its defence minister brand the dead and their fellow demonstrators enemies of the state. Even Amnesty International that is well known for its anti-India rhetoric called the reports of lethal force “disturbing” and demanded an independent probe.
Warning: Disturbing visuals
Unable to control the story, Islamabad reached for censorship. Al Jazeera’s extensive coverage of the Muzaffarabad election boycott and crackdown got the network’s access restricted inside Pakistan, with the information ministry branding it “yellow journalism.”
Critics of the network have long argued its coverage tilts toward Islamist movements across the region — which makes it a curious source for Islamabad to now denounce as biased, but the substance of what it filmed — heavy security deployments, blackouts, low turnout — is what actually triggered the ban. Alongside that came sweeping new Foreign Media Facilitation Guidelines requiring foreign journalists to obtain government clearance before travelling anywhere outside Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi. The architecture exists to keep reporters away from exactly the places — PoJK foremost — where the state’s own conduct doesn’t match its rhetoric.
Seven years ago, this week on 5 August, India amended its own constitution to fully apply it in its region of Jammu and Kashmir, ending the legal discrimination that Article 370 and 35(A) had entrenched against women and minorities in the region.
What has followed is a period of stability and economic growth. Jammu and Kashmir’s tourism department recorded roughly 78.5 million visits across 2023–25, more than 60% above the 47.6 million recorded in 2016–18 — a region drawing tens of millions of tourists a year, not one that needs a permission slip to let a journalist in. Even in 2025, a year shadowed by the April terror attack at Pahalgam, the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir still logged over 16 million tourist arrivals.
Indians Kashmiris now openly challenge the fake narrative emanating from Pakistan which for decades fuelled cross-border terrorism responsible for thousands of civilian deaths in Jammu and Kashmir.
India today has emerged as the third superpower in an increasingly multipolar world, while Pakistan closes itself off from its own journalists to hide a body count. The price one pays for religious fundamentalism and bigotry couldn’t be starker.
*Kashmir has been an integral part of the Indian civilisational and cultural landscape for thousands of years, with the name “Kashmir” itself derived from the Hindu sage Kashyapa in ancient Indian texts and tradition.
*Pakistan is an Islamic state carved out of India in 1947. India is the world’s oldest surviving civilisation and the world’s largest secular democracy.
*Lt Gen Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry is the son of Mahmood Sultan Bashir-Ud-Din, a Pakistani nuclear scientist who was designated a terrorist by the United Nations Security Council in 2001 under its al-Qaeda sanctions regime for his links to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
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