The ruling party knows it's going to be booted out, so they've resorted to spreading fake news about their "superior" performance. From Imran Khan to the lowliest minion in his party, and despite even international experts saying that the GDP growth rate is not more than 1.5 percent, they claim that it's more than 4 percent. Of course, they conveniently refuse to explain why, if the economy is so strong, people are dying of hunger and malnutrition due to rampant inflation. And so, to prevent the common people from knowing the truth, they attack journalists who report the actual facts. 


The other day, the information minister Fawad Choudhry (who is in fact the dis-information minister) appeared on "Hard Talk" and did his best to project that Imran Khan is the best leader Pakistan has ever had, that the economy is doing much better than in past years and that the media is very free, which must be the joke of the century. The irony is that he said this a day after journalist Asad Toor was hammered by goons who forced their way into his apartment. Almost every Pakistani knows who was behind this attack, and others that have happened regularly. 

Fawad Choudhry also said Imran Khan received 200 million votes in the 2018 elections, which is probably more than the country's population at the time. I have noticed that Imran Khan and his minions are not aware how many zeroes there are in a million. They think a "lakh" (hundred thousand) is a million, while a "crore" (ten million) is a billion. 

This time, though, journalists have responded with courage. particularly Hamid Mir, who survived a heinous attack in Karachi a few years back. After he named the country's premier intelligence agency's chief as the perpetrator of the attack, he was called a traitor and the news channel GEO as anti-national. And it is in Imran Khan's reign that GEO's owner was incarcerated for eight months without trial on trumped up charges. And yet Imran Khan and his ministers routinely claim that the media in Pakistan is more free than in UK and other countries! By the way, I wonder why Stephen Sackur didn't mention the jailing of the owner of GEO. Apparently he hadn't done his homework.

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