By Syed Haider Raza Mehdi
An article in today’s Dawn states that the PM’s visit to China was a failure.
It is a sad commentary on how facts are twisted, half truths packaged as truths and outright lies peddled as factual ingormation!
The author either knows very little about the project or has deliberately advocated a completely misleading narrative.
It is sad that Dawn, once a great newspaper now will pretty much publish any indecent garbage, to force “people” to allow its distribution in Larkana, home to its largest segment of readers ?.
The article is factually incorrect.
It establishes a false and an incorrect context, peddles false information and consequently draws deliberately incorrect and faulty conclusions.
This is how 5th generation warfare is being fought. And we the people are suitably gullible to lap up this garbage!
Scores of my seemingly smart friends and associates forwarded this article to me as if say
…. *thay hon duss buchoo?*
Here’s my *”hun duss”*
1. CPEC, at this point in time, is the single largest project of its OBOR program. Go research and check.
2. Pakistan does not have to return any LOAN to Chinese companies. These Chinese companies have to return loans they’ve taken from Chinese banks to deliver CPEC projects in Pakistan. This has been stated multiple times by the Chinese and most recently by the Chinese Ambassador!
3. The only thing we are renegotiating is the return promised to these companies, signed between the GOP under the PMLN, in excess of 30%, an unheard promise to all these State owned Chinese companies. These exorbitant usurious returns had massive kickbacks padded into them for those who signed them!
This was and is Pakistani tax payers money which was brutally committed by a corrupt kleptocratic/plutocratic government under Nawaz Sharif, as their Sheer e Maadar.
4. The Chinese President, at the request of the current PTI government, has agreed to renegotiate all these terms, since all these Chinese companies are state owned.
5. Read Asad Umar’s statement that the Balance of Payment crisis is over and that China has agreed to a “package”, details of which will be worked out starting Friday, 09th November.
In summary, this is an evil, deliberately mischievous article written by a person who:
1. Does not know the facts.
2. Deliberately misrepresented information and data.
3. Deliberately drew completely wrong and very dangerous and highly inflammatory conclusions.
Sad, that a newspaper like Dawn continues its steep slippery slide into garbagedom by deliberately fermenting such falsehood and giving place to such patently mischievous and seditious nonsense on its pages!
The decline of Dawn and its journalistic standards is symptomatic of much that ails this country. The content of its editorials and op-ed columns are , to borrow your term, ‘garbage’. It dismays me to see once respected columnists write not-so-cleverly disguised articles that only seek to discredit the present government and project corrupt and dishonest looters as ‘victims’. Any move to investigate and prosecute the syndicate of corrupt politicians and bureaucrats is decried as ‘political victimization’ and an attack on democracy.