Tarar claims man arrested for spreading anti-state material online in exchange for Indian funding

Information Minister Attaullah Tarar on Sunday announced the arrest of a man allegedly involved in the spread of anti-state content on social media in exchange for funding from India.

In a televised message aired on state media, the information minister said that security forces had some time back arrested a man working in digital marketing services whose business activities were allegedly found to have links in India.

The minister accused the arrested suspect of receiving payments from India in exchange for running a “network of misinformation” in Pakistan.

The minister observed that Indian-funded troll farms operating on social media often sought digital marketing services.

Tarar alleged that the digital marketing professional with the help of bot farms had spread and made viral on social media “anti-state content and content against Pakistan, its security, government, army, army chief and government institutions”.

The minister also showed screenshots of transactions and posts that were allegedly part of the misinformation campaign which promoted sectarian violence, recent unrest in Azad Jammu and Kashmir and anti-state and anti-army elements.

“The man had a WhatsApp chat with his Indian operator, where they talked about views (on posts), and money and account details were being exchanged,” Tarar claimed.

“Small amounts of funds were transferred so that the payments would not be detected by financial monitoring units,” Tarar said, adding that the government was now investigating digital payment gateways.

The information minister also claimed that the individual had confessed that “most of the content he received was about the Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC)”, which the government declared a proscribed organisation following its call for widespread protests on June 9.

At this, the minister shifted his attention to what he described as the “JAAC-anti-state nexus”, claiming that the now-proscribed group “wants to harm the Kashmir cause, and they want to weaken Pakistan’s relationship with Kashmir”.

Drawing a connection between the arrested suspect and JAAC, the minister claimed that the government now had “irrefutable evidence” of the group’s ties to India.

Over the past month, the regional administration and the JAAC have been at odds over various issues, most notably the committee’s demand to abolish the 12 seats in the region’s Legislative Assembly, which has resulted in protests across the region.

“If they care so much about the Kashmir cause, why don’t they contest elections and become a part of the electoral process and talk about people’s issues,” the minister questioned.

“This digital marketing campaign — what interest does India have in Kashmir? [..] It has been proven through data that all the payments made for the social media material were from India.”

Tarar said the group was now “answerable to the entire nation for taking funding from the enemy [..] and running a disinformation campaign against Pakistan, and the army based on hatred”.

“Their nexus with anti-state elements is now clear as daylight,” he claimed.

He went on to say that political parties in AJK were campaigning ahead of the upcoming elections with “huge swathes of people expressing support for them”.

He cited this as evidence that the Kashmiri people had “rejected JAAC’s conspiratory politics” and “proved that Pakistan’s relationship with Kashmir cannot be weakened or broken”.

The information minister claimed that Pakistan’s recent globally recognised diplomatic successes, as well as its defeat of India in the May 2025 conflict, were “hard to digest” for its enemies “and therefore groups such as JAAC” emerge. ...