LONDON: A United Kingdom-based human rights group that has spent four months counting the dead, detained and missing in Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir (PaJK) found itself recast, across Pakistan’s media in a span of one hour on one single day – October 18 - as an instrument of Indian intelligence.
Between roughly 3.00 PM and 4.00 PM Pakistan time, WE News English and Dunya News published near-identical accounts alleging that the Indian High Commission in London had engineered the creation of the Jammu Kashmir Human Rights Observatory (JKHRO) to amplify the narrative of the Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC), the civil-rights coalition the regional government banned on 5 June 2026.
Samaa TV ran the same allegations, as did state broadcaster PTV, an official-looking X account styled “Pak TV Global”, and a slickly produced explainer video on the YouTube channel Pakistan Connect.
Every version told the same story, in the same order, using the same words, with the same numbers. The common denominators were contact between Indian diplomats and JAAC figures in April, a June meeting in London between Indian High Commission official Pramod Khemchandani and Zakka Jacob of the Indian channel Times Now, “17 WhatsApp calls” to three named individuals, the registration of JKHRO in the UK on July 30; and international coverage of its reports in The Independent, Times Now and Kashmir Times.
None of these reports carried a response from JKHRO, and none cited a named official, a document that could be scrutinized, or any evidence beyond the say-so of unnamed “intelligence sources”. Samaa’s own copy conceded that the allegations had not been independently verified.
No response has come from the Indian High Commission to this string of reports.
The most specific allegation — repeated by Pak TV Global and spelled out in the Pakistan Connect video — is that Khemchandani is formally tied to JKHRO through its registration papers and is even listed as a “person with significant control” of the company. That is something anyone can check.
The UK company incorporated on 30 July 2026 whose directors match the three individuals named in the Pakistani reports is Human Rights Observatory Ltd (company no. 17371427), a private company limited by guarantee without share capital which is the standard structure for a UK not-for-profit. Its register of officers lists three directors, all appointed on the day of incorporation: Azhar Ahmed and Dr Ishtiaq Khaliq, both British nationals, and Yasir Shafaat, a Pakistani national resident in England. No Indian diplomat appears among them.
As of October 20, its significant-control register records no person with significant control at all, only a statement filed on July 30, that the company has no registrable person or legal entity. The central documentary “proof” in the October 18 reports, in other words, does not exist on the public register it claims to come from.
The chronology is also inverted. The Pakistani reports present JKHRO as a vehicle conceived in June and launched on July 30. But JKHRO’s first situation report covered events from June 5 to 23, and its third report carried updates up to July 14, before any company was incorporated. The organisation was documenting first and incorporating later, which is the ordinary order of things for a volunteer group that formalises itself once its work grows.
JKHRO issued a formal rebuttal on the evening of October 18, rejecting what it called baseless allegations by ARY News and other outlets and demanding that they produce credible, verifiable evidence or withdraw their claims and publish corrections. It said it was examining the broadcasts and reserved the right to pursue legal and regulatory remedies, including defamation proceedings.
The organisation categorically denies that any of its activists or members has ever met anyone from the Indian High Commission. Its statement points to the 1998 UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, which protects the right to document abuses and to engage with international bodies and argues that correspondence with the UN or diplomatic missions is being misrepresented as conspiracy. Criticism of state institutions, it says, is not treason.
Asked why a documentation effort had to be run from abroad, Sardar Aftab Khan who has been actively involved with JKHRO’s documentation work, said in an interview with the Kashmir Times, that the group had not originally seen a need for it. “PaJK had its own human rights organisations working on the ground, he said, but since June those voices had been muted under severe state repression. Someone had to keep the record,” he said.
He added that every case that the JKHRO documents is verified from the ground. With internet curbs in place, that is not easy. “We bring testimonies, and we include a case only after multiple verification and checking with sources. Complaints that reached us but could not be verified were left off the list.”
JKHRO’s reports are published with the same caveats. Each states that it is not an official casualty roll and that its figures require corroboration through family statements, hospital records, post-mortems and independent inquiry. By August the group had raised its verified civilian death toll to 89, while separating confirmed cases from those still under investigation.
Its 47-page report on deaths and disappearances around the July elections was the basis for an Independent investigation this month into families still searching for answers. JKHRO says it invited the authorities to respond to every allegation in it. It had written separately to both the Department of Human Rights of ‘Azad Jammu and Kashmir’ and Ministry of Human Rights to Pakistan. Both has acknowledged the receipt of their reports but had given no response, the JKHRO said.
Coordinated messaging leaves pugmarks, and these are unusually clear. The table below sets the five 18 October items side by side in five of these reports.
* Samaa refers to "WhatsApp calls and meetings" without giving a number. Compiled from the reports and social media posts of five media organisations. AI Claude was used to generate the table.
About two months before the campaign, a senior journalist who previously worked for one of Pakistan’s leading broadcast channels described to this reporter how the country’s newsrooms now operate. He spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, and he was talking about the media in general, not about JKHRO. On any political or security matter, he said, scripts and material now come from the army’s media wing, Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), as verbal instructions rather than written orders, so that no paper trail is left.
Another journalist had said that this trend had led to forced termination of many journalists from television channels.
The October 18 coverage fits his description closely - the same copy, word for word, on every channel and in every social media post. Their accounts could not be independently confirmed for this report, and ISPR has not publicly claimed any role in the stories. But it matches what Pakistani journalists have described before.
In 2019, several told Al Jazeera that the military’s press wing relayed coverage requests to editors and owners through WhatsApp groups. The same year the regulator PEMRA told channels to seek ISPR clearance before booking retired officers as defence analysts, a directive the Islamabad High Court later questioned. One such retired officer, Brigadier (R) Babar Alauddin, appeared on PTV on 18 October to tell viewers that India funds unrest in PaJK and that RAW directs the JAAC.
The pattern has precedent in this crisis too. In August, Pakistan’s Express Tribune debunked as doctored a viral image claiming to show an Indian High Commission official at a JAAC rally in London; Soch Fact Check found the man’s face had been digitally swapped.
Weeks earlier, a senior security official had briefed “media influencers” that the JAAC leadership was acting on an Indian agenda. The October 18 campaign took that line a step further - from the protest movement to the people documenting what happened to it.
These allegations were made amidst a press environment that has been tightened step by step since the PaJK unrest began. Authorities cut mobile and internet services on June 5 - the partial blackout passed 100 days in September, and Amnesty International warned that it blocked independent verification of deaths during the July election violence.
In August, the information ministry issued foreign media guidelines requiring journalists working for international outlets, along with their fixers and sources, to obtain a no-objection certificate before reporting outside Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi, after officials accused Al Jazeera of “yellow journalism” and access to its website was restricted.
Journalist Syed Farhad Ali Shah went on hunger strike after more than a month in detention without charge, and Razi Tahir and Muhammad Saif were detained on August 1 after covering the unrest. On October 13, PEMRA barred live coverage of attacks and other “unpleasant” incidents, permitting only information verified by government or security agencies.
Independent reporting on PaJK is close to impossible, while officially supplied narratives flow freely. A human rights group abroad, working from testimonies gathered over unreliable connections, became one of the few sources of systematic information.
Critics argue that this is precisely why the JKHRO is being targeted. Shams Rehman, an author, researcher and broadcaster, told the Kashmir Times that this attack follows an established pattern of Indian and Pakistani officials to demonise Kashmiris on both sides of the Line of Control. “The best-used allegation is accusing Kashmiris of working for Indian or Pakistani interests,” he said.
He categorically said that since JKHRO has managed to collate significant variable data despite the communication blockade and concealing the number of people killed in the region, that documentation dented the Pakistani state narrative.
JKHRO is a small fragment of the much larger mobilisation that Islamabad has struggled to contain. Britain is home to one of the largest Kashmiri diasporas in the world, most of it with family roots in PaJK, and since June it has turned the crisis into a Westminster issue.
Thousands protested outside the Pakistan High Commission in London several times since the state crackdown in Rawalakot, one march reporting over 10,000 protestors. Parallel demonstrations were held in Birmingham and Bradford, and campaigners secured an Early Day Motion and a letter from the APPG on Kashmir to the Foreign Secretary.
On July 30, more than 50 MPs, led by APPG chair Imran Hussain, wrote to the Foreign Secretary about live fire on protesters and the communications blackout, citing constituents with relatives in the region. In Bradford, organisers say they have protested outside the consulate every weekday for three months. Pakistan’s Foreign Office has dismissed the parliamentary interventions as ill-informed interference.
Against that backdrop, the decision to aim a coordinated, one-day media barrage at a single, small documentation group looks less like a counter-intelligence disclosure than an attempt to discredit the evidence base on which British parliamentarians, journalists and UN mechanisms rely.
Its three directors are named on the public register. At least two of them are British citizens. Branding them as agents of a hostile state, on national television and without evidence, exposes them and the families and witnesses who speak to them to obvious risk.
The October 18 reports made sweeping allegations but provided no evidence of any link between the rights group and the Indian High Commission. What it offered instead was evidence of how Pakistan’s media now functions with identical copy, identical timing, identical sourcing, across private channels, the state broadcaster and anonymous social accounts.
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