The manner in which Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s Defense Minister Khwaja Asif has dubbed the Dawn News-plant case as a thing of past is sinister itself. He has not made a firm statement to that effect. He has infact expressed his total alienation from the subject—broodingly stating that he was never involved in any discussions at any level on the issue.
Yet, while talking to Samaa’s Nadeem Malik he has forcefully opined that the News-plant issue stood resolved.
“I am not stating this on the basis of any knowledge but of my own personal wisdom, that the matter is now history.”
Whether or not the matter of contrived planting of news in Dawn, and of ensuring that the fabricated news aimed to portray Pakistan Army as a rogue institution was published, had become history will be known only in the times to come. But the planted head of the Defense Ministry has made sure that the issue of the News-plant and of the forthcoming appointment of General Raheel Sharif as the head of a multi-country Islamic military force get interlinked in the minds of the people.
This is an extraordinarily smart way of hatching a conspiratorial DEAL theory with the sinister objective of creating doubts about the integrity of our army leadership.