New Delhi:
The New York Times has been pulled up by a House Committee in the US for its reportage of the terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam, in which 26 people, including a foreign national were shot dead after being asked to prove their allegiance to Islam.
The attack, for which a Pakistan-based terror group The Resistance Front – an offshoot of the banned Lashkar-e-Taiba – claimed responsibility, was reported by The New York Times as a “militant” attack. An introduction to the report also said that it was Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who called the “shooting” a “terror attack”.
NYT CALLED OUT OVER TERROR REPORTAGE
The Foreign Affairs Committee of the United States government took to social media to publicly call out The New York Times article over its news report, describing it as being “removed from reality”. The NYT headline read ‘At Least 24 Tourists Gunned Down by Militants in Kashmir’.
“This was a terrorist attack, plain and simple,” noted the US government, adding that “Whether it’s India or Israel, when it comes to terrorism, the NYT is removed from reality.”
The post also shared a photo with the correction made on NYT’s behalf, saying, “Hey, NYT, we fixed it for you.”
Hey, @nytimes we fixed it for you. This was a TERRORIST ATTACK plain and simple.
Whether it’s India or Israel, when it comes to TERRORISM the NYT is removed from reality. pic.twitter.com/7PefEKMtdq
— House Foreign Affairs Committee Majority (@HouseForeignGOP) April 23, 2025
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MILITANCY AND TERRORISM
Militancy usually refers to an armed rebellion from within a State in order to achieve a political or social outcome, whereas terrorism has an external context, where a calculated use of violence creates a climate of fear in a particular geography in order to wage asymmetrical warfare against a foreign nation to destabilize the region towards a larger intent or objective.
India, in a statement on Wednesday, said that a top-level meeting on security chaired by the prime minister noted that “In the briefing to the Cabinet Committee on Security, the cross-border linkages of the terrorist attack were brought out. It was noted that this attack came in the wake of the successful holding of elections in the Union Territory and its steady progress towards economic growth and development.”
‘DOUBLE-STANDARDS’
The Lashkar-e-Taiba or LeT, from which its shadow outfit The Resistance Front stems, is a UN-designated terrorist organisation, which makes its terror credentials recognised globally. Yet, a large swathe of the western media, which President Trump refers to as “legacy media”, often report incidents of terror as “shootings” or “militant” incidents, according to analysts.
Pakistan has, for decades, carried out “cross-border terrorism” against India and claimed it to be the act of “non-State actors” – a classic case of proxy warfare. India has on numerous occasions shared evidence with Pakistan about terrorists coming from areas under its illegal occupation and control, but Islamabad has never cooperated with New Delhi.
Analysts have often pinpointed the “double-standards” in the western media’s coverage of Kashmir. While most of the “legacy media” in the West report Russia’s moves in Ukraine as “an invasion”, the same media reports Kashmir as a “dispute” and not Pakistan’s invasion of Indian territory.
THE INVASION OF JAMMU AND KASHMIR
In 1947, during Partition of India, two nations were formed – India, which chose to remain secular, and Pakistan, which was created on the ideology of the Two-Nation Theory – which demanded a separate nation for Muslims. Tens of millions of Muslims had rejected the idea of Pakistan and its founder Jinnah, and chose to stay in a secular India. But, by then, the lines were drawn.
Pakistan thereby became the first nation in the world to be formed on the basis not of a common language or ethnicity, but on that of religion.
At the time of Independence, the erstwhile princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, which includes the Northern Areas – now called Gilgit-Baltistan – joined the Union of India by signing the instrument of accession. But Pakistan, which was formed on the ideology of the two-nation theory claimed that the people of Jammu and Kashmir – a Muslim-majority state, should ‘ideally’ belong to Pakistan because of that argument.
But when Karachi (then Capital of Pakistan), saw that Jammu and Kashmir had merged with India, Muhammad Ali Jinnah – the founder of Pakistan – orchestrated an invasion by sending tribesmen who fueled widespread violence in Kashmir. He then ordered troops of the newly-formed Pakistan Army to invade Kashmir and forcibly take it over. This led to an armed conflict between India and Pakistan. By the time the Indian forces could reach Kashmir, Pakistan had invaded and illegally occupied the regions we now refer to as Pakistan-occupied Kashmir – which includes the Gilgit-Baltistan region.
