Dangerous gullibility

Pakistan Defence Minister Khawaja Asif is the latest political luminary to fall for a hoax on social media. Asif was furious on learning that Israel had threatened a nuclear strike for Pakistan's role in Syria against ISIS. Without caring to do research on such a sensitive matter, the Pakistani minister threateningly reminded Israel that his country also possessed nuclear weapons. Not too long back, Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh had caused a sensation when he suggested that Hafiz Saeed was supporting the protesting students on the JNU campus. His suggestion was based on a tweet from a parody account of the Pakistani militant leader. Both Asif and Singh never bothered with a retraction. Asif went quiet after being mocked over social media. Singh was blasé. His ministry maintained that his remark was based on intelligence inputs.   

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Because of the exponential rise in this tendency on social media, Oxford dictionary selected “post-truth” as the word of the year. Facebook has promised to introduce tools that prevent its platform from becoming the disseminator of fake news stories. “Post-truth” stands for the grey area between truth and lie and honesty and dishonesty. A lie is stated with such conviction that it appears to be true. Rajnath and Khawaja Asif did not contribute to post-truth. But they did misspeak on delicate issues without bothering to do background checks. Khawaja could have been doubly careful; only recently a post-truth article had triggered a political firestorm in Pakistan by claiming the new Pakistan army chief was from a minority community. 

Pakistan and Israel are separated by distance. Therefore, the after-effect of Khawaja’s not-so-veiled warning was limited to social media. But unsubstantiated verbal skirmishing between adversarial neighbours such as India and Pakistan has the potential of translating into something nasty on the ground. Our world is in the middle of unprecedented disorder where trust has been an early victim. Political leaders must lead the orderly reshaping of our reflex and response mechanisms to the explosion of largely unverifiable information on the Internet. The need for caution before reacting holds true not just for public leaders but all of us.