The dead professor and the vast pro-India disinformation campaign
By Abid Hussain & Shruti Menon
BBC Urdu & BBC Reality Check
Published
image copyrightReuters
image captionThe UN Human Rights Council meets at least three times a year and reviews UN member states rights records A dead professor and numerous defunct organisations were resurrected and used alongside at least 750 fake media outlets in a vast 15-year global disinformation campaign to serve Indian interests, a new investigation has revealed.
The man whose identity was stolen was regarded as one of the founding fathers of international human rights law, who died aged 92 in 2006.
The network was designed primarily to discredit Pakistan internationally and influence decision-making at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and European Parliament, EU DisinfoLab said.
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, December 10
A European NGO claims to have uncovered a disinformation campaign that was allegedly being fronted by a Delhi-based think-tank.
This Indian think-tank was also involved in transporting mostly right-wing Members of European Parliament (MEPs) for a tour of Kashmir.
In an extensive report, the NGO “EU DisinfoLab” pointed fingers at a website “The EU Chronicle”, “the newest iteration of an influence campaign run by an Indian organisation called the Srivastava Group”.
The website mainly drives Indian security interests mainly against Pakistan and China by publishing content against their activities. This is then often reused by an Indian news agency and hundreds of domains, some of which were identified as Sierra Leone Times and TajikistanNews.net. One Indian business magazine had reportedly published at least eight clips from the Indian agency that were lifted from “EU Chronicle”.