A whole section of the Pakistani establishment seems to be revolving around and thriving on a single-point agenda: destabilise India.
The Ghulam Nabi Fai episode now and the Tahawwur Rana-David Coleman Headley affair a couple of months earlier have already exposed the extent and intensity of the engagement of powerful state forces with the anti-India terror elements.
It now comes to light that the racket involving the printing of fake Indian currency is not the handiwork of some lone isolated outlaw or a group of such characters backed by rogue officials of the ISI. The link leads straight up to the state-owned mint in Pakistan.
According to a report in DNA, sources in the National Investigative Agency (NIA) have revealed that the fake currency notes circulated in India to sponsor terror agents and destabilise the economy are manufactured in the same state facility where Pakistani currency notes are also printed.
The expert committee, which compared genuine Pakistani notes with the fake Indian ones, has found startling similarities. The initial report of the committee says that the dry offset printing method was used to manufacture both; the PH value found on fake Indian currency notes of the denomination of 500 and 1,000 was exactly the same as in the Pakistani notes; and the grammage – the grams per square metre of paper, an indicator of the nature of the paper used – was identical too.
The last one and the presence of poly vinyl alcohol on the surface of the papers used, make it clear that the paper for both types of currency notes came from the same source, the report says.
The committee concludes that the quality, scale and other technical values make it clear that both sets of currency notes could be manufactured by machines owned by a country only.
The Pakistani origin of the fake notes doesn’t surprise anyone. Such notes have been in circulation in India for a long time now and conduits are picked up by intelligence and law enforcing agencies on a regular basis all over the country. The CBI and other agencies are right now probing how the terror outfits on the other side of the border lay their hands on the security features of the secret templates for Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes.
Investigators link the theft to the ISI’s desperation to make the fake currency notes look authentic. The earlier notes, though cost effective, were detected easily. After getting hold of the template, the manufacturers have also shifted to imported paper for printing from the wood pulp-based paper earlier used.
The ISI’s dogged efforts at counterfeiting have made the fakes hardly distinguishable from the original. The threads, the watermarks, the Ashoka Pillar, Mahatma Gandhi’s image, the denomination and the RBI mark in the new bunch of notes are sharp and nearly as good as in the original India notes.
The investigators have been hinting for sometime that the operation has been moved to government presses in Quetta, Lahore and Peshawar to achieve more sophistication. The final product is then routed from the presses into India through conduits in Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. The NIA expert committee’s revelation only confirms the suspicion.
What is surprising here is the scale of the conspiracy against India and it multi-prongedness. At one level Pakistan is spending an enormous amount of energy to influence intellectuals across the globe against India — the Fai episode makes it evident — and at another level it is directly unleashing forces such as terror outfits and the counterfeiting racket to weaken us. There could be many other undetected fronts too.
If only the country spent that much energy in putting its house in order.
But since Pakistan seems so keen to print Indian currency, maybe as a confidence-building measure we can hand out the contract to the Quetta mint. This way the RBI saves the cost of printing the notes, and the Pakistanis can send us the money through the Samjhauta Express instead of low-level couriers.
The Ghulam Nabi Fai episode now and the Tahawwur Rana-David Coleman Headley affair a couple of months earlier have already exposed the extent and intensity of the engagement of powerful state forces with the anti-India terror elements.
It now comes to light that the racket involving the printing of fake Indian currency is not the handiwork of some lone isolated outlaw or a group of such characters backed by rogue officials of the ISI. The link leads straight up to the state-owned mint in Pakistan.
According to a report in DNA, sources in the National Investigative Agency (NIA) have revealed that the fake currency notes circulated in India to sponsor terror agents and destabilise the economy are manufactured in the same state facility where Pakistani currency notes are also printed.
The expert committee, which compared genuine Pakistani notes with the fake Indian ones, has found startling similarities. The initial report of the committee says that the dry offset printing method was used to manufacture both; the PH value found on fake Indian currency notes of the denomination of 500 and 1,000 was exactly the same as in the Pakistani notes; and the grammage – the grams per square metre of paper, an indicator of the nature of the paper used – was identical too.
The last one and the presence of poly vinyl alcohol on the surface of the papers used, make it clear that the paper for both types of currency notes came from the same source, the report says.
The committee concludes that the quality, scale and other technical values make it clear that both sets of currency notes could be manufactured by machines owned by a country only.
The Pakistani origin of the fake notes doesn’t surprise anyone. Such notes have been in circulation in India for a long time now and conduits are picked up by intelligence and law enforcing agencies on a regular basis all over the country. The CBI and other agencies are right now probing how the terror outfits on the other side of the border lay their hands on the security features of the secret templates for Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes.
Investigators link the theft to the ISI’s desperation to make the fake currency notes look authentic. The earlier notes, though cost effective, were detected easily. After getting hold of the template, the manufacturers have also shifted to imported paper for printing from the wood pulp-based paper earlier used.
The ISI’s dogged efforts at counterfeiting have made the fakes hardly distinguishable from the original. The threads, the watermarks, the Ashoka Pillar, Mahatma Gandhi’s image, the denomination and the RBI mark in the new bunch of notes are sharp and nearly as good as in the original India notes.
The investigators have been hinting for sometime that the operation has been moved to government presses in Quetta, Lahore and Peshawar to achieve more sophistication. The final product is then routed from the presses into India through conduits in Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. The NIA expert committee’s revelation only confirms the suspicion.
What is surprising here is the scale of the conspiracy against India and it multi-prongedness. At one level Pakistan is spending an enormous amount of energy to influence intellectuals across the globe against India — the Fai episode makes it evident — and at another level it is directly unleashing forces such as terror outfits and the counterfeiting racket to weaken us. There could be many other undetected fronts too.
If only the country spent that much energy in putting its house in order.
But since Pakistan seems so keen to print Indian currency, maybe as a confidence-building measure we can hand out the contract to the Quetta mint. This way the RBI saves the cost of printing the notes, and the Pakistanis can send us the money through the Samjhauta Express instead of low-level couriers.
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