The mass exodus of the Northeast people from Bengaluru, Mumbai, Pune, Chennai and Hyderabad was reportedly a “sample” of psywar (psychological war) by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence in India to instil fear in the minds of the vulnerable target group — the northeastern people, who have migrated to other states in the country for higher education and jobs, said a top intelligence source.
The ISI, this time, allegedly used the Internet and the social media sites to incite a sense of fear among the NE people with the underlying warning that they are not safe anywhere — not in their home state or the adoptive states, the source said.
The Northeast people, prone to chronic stress due to their exposure to constant instability in their regions, were deliberately targeted because it is reportedly “easy to unnerve them and create fear psychosis in them despite there being no major incident of violence reported against them anywhere in India during this period.”
Unlike a physical terror attack, Intelligence agencies cannot predict a psywar, and “this one came without a warning,” the source said. One of the doctored videos, which showed a veiled Muslim woman — an alleged illegal immigrant from Bangladesh — speaking about the atrocities against them by the Bodos, gave the ISI plan away.
“The woman in the video was speaking fluent Hindi whereas the illegal Bangladeshi immigrants can’t speak good Hindi; they have a strong accent,” said the officer, who added that Pakistan has perfected the art of psywar or psyjihad in Kashmir to instil fear and hatred in the minds of the Kashmiris against their own country.
“They were quick to cash in on last month’s Assam violence between the illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and Bodos and used the internet in sending morphed videos wrongly projecting violence against the Rohingya Muslims in Burma by the Rakhine Buddhists, and the illegal Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants by the Bodos to create panic and communal hatred,” he added.