Media Blackout: Pakistani Proxies Use Times Square to Threaten Nuclear War on India — Headlined by Convicted ISI Agent and Proxies for Banned Terrorists (Video)

Under the giant screens of Times Square, New York, and in full view of thousands of unsuspecting tourists, hundreds gathered on August 3 for what was billed as a “human rights” rally for Kashmir.

But the rally’s leadership told a different story. It was fronted by a convicted Pakistani ISI agent and flanked by champions of banned terrorists, turning Manhattan’s most iconic public square into a stage for Pakistan’s state propaganda, extremist demands, and open nuclear threats against India.

Despite the explosive rhetoric and direct ties to foreign intelligence and militancy, the event drew no major U.S. media coverage. This silence speaks volumes about how easily hostile state narratives can operate in plain sight.

Not a Protest — A Choreographed State Operation

What unfolded was not a spontaneous outpouring of opinion but a carefully choreographed extension of Pakistan’s decades-long information and agitation strategy against India.

For more than two hours, speakers accused India of “illegal occupation,” demanded the release of convicted separatist leaders, and warned that failure to “solve” the dispute could lead to nuclear war between Pakistan and India.

The rally’s themes, slogans, and demands tracked closely with Islamabad’s long-standing public line on Kashmir, showing how a foreign government’s narrative can be broadcast unfiltered from the heart of New York City.

The Date and the Strategy

Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the August 5, 2019, revocation of Articles 370 and 35A was a decisive, lawful act passed by India’s Parliament to fully integrate Jammu & Kashmir into the Union, extend equal rights and protections to its residents, and end decades of separatist appeasement that had cost thousands of civilian and security lives.

The Times Square rally was timed to the eve of the sixth anniversary of that decision, a date Pakistan has since rebranded as Youm-e-Istehsal (Kashmir Siege Day), an annual, state-backed observance used to project Islamabad’s position abroad.

Inside Pakistan, the day brings official speeches, flag-raisings, and street demonstrations. Outside Pakistan, it reliably produces high-visibility rallies in Western capitals.

This formula, state-backed agitation inside Pakistan paired with high-profile demonstrations abroad, has been a hallmark of Pakistan’s hybrid warfare strategy against India since the 1990s. The diaspora element allows Islamabad to launder its message through ostensibly grassroots voices, while the choreography and talking points remain identical to those pushed by Pakistan’s ministries and military intelligence. It ensures that Pakistan’s internal grievances are exported into Western capitals, where they can be reframed as “human rights” issues, shielded by free speech protections, and fed into global media pipelines.

Times Square, with its built-in media optics and social-video reach, was the prime venue this year, providing professional-quality visuals for international amplification and diaspora mobilization.

The Convicted Foreign Agent at the Microphone

Leadership and messaging reflected that broader apparatus. On stage was “Dr.” Syed Ghulam Nabi Fai, head of the Washington-based World Kashmir Awareness Forum, whose 2011 U.S. guilty plea for conspiring to act as an unregistered agent of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) remains a matter of public record; prosecutors detailed millions of dollars covertly routed to influence American lawmakers and opinion on Kashmir, and Fai was sentenced to 24 months.

For decades, he has also inflated his stature by falsely claiming a PhD from Temple University, a degree he never earned but nonetheless used in official correspondence, media appearances, and public events to lend himself legitimacy, a title still echoed uncritically in Pakistani press coverage. His presence in Times Square, leading chants and framing the day’s narrative, was a direct throughline from Pakistan’s military intelligence apparatus to a U.S. public square.

The Network Behind the Rally

Alongside him, according to Urdu-language coverage and event introductions captured on video from the scene, were Chaudhry Maqbool Gujjar, a former minister in Pakistan-administered Kashmir; Taj Khan of Kashmir Mission USA; Radical Raja Mukhtar Ahmed of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), which India has banned for militant activity; and local organizers and activists including Sardar Imtiaz Gadalvi, Sardar Sajid Sawar, Raja Zafar, Sagheer Khan, Zamir Minhas, Amna Taj, Rt. Major Arif Naveed, Ms. Safura Wasim, Advocate Sardar Imtiaz Khan Garalevi, Raja Bashir Sahib, Ataul Zafar, Saghir Khan of the Kashmiri American Alliance, Shahid Comrade of the Pakistan–USA Freedom Forum, Faiz Khalid Quraishi, and Sister Amna Habib.

The network behind the rally spanned multiple diaspora fronts tied to Pakistan’s official narrative, including the World Kashmir Awareness Forum, World Forum for Peace and Justice, Kashmir Mission USA, the Kashmiri American Alliance, and the Pakistan–USA Freedom Forum. These groups operate in the U.S. as advocacy outfits but consistently echo Islamabad’s talking points, provide platforms for individuals with histories of militancy or foreign-agent activity, and call for the release of convicted terrorists.

From the microphone, the rhetoric was incendiary and unapologetic — and delivered almost entirely in Urdu, a deliberate choice that both signaled allegiance to Pakistan’s state narrative and ensured the message resonated with the Pakistani and Kashmiri diaspora while largely bypassing non-Urdu-speaking journalists, law enforcement, and casual American passersby.

Speakers branded India an “occupying force,” denounced the 2019 constitutional change as “illegal under international law,” and claimed “more than a thousand Kashmiris” had been “martyred” since that decision. They accused India of “ethnic cleansing,” “genocide,” “land grabbing,” “converting Muslim majorities into Hindu majorities,” and forcing Kashmiris into “ghettos.” Some speakers likened the situation to East Timor, South Sudan, and Namibia, international precedents for secession, and claimed UN Security Council Resolutions 91 (1951) and 122 (1957) as legal grounds against India’s sovereignty in Jammu & Kashmir.

They vowed that “this war will continue” until “freedom for Kashmir” is achieved, a pledge that framed the conflict not as a political dispute, but as an ongoing struggle to be fought until India’s control is broken.

The demands went far beyond policy change or human-rights rhetoric. From the stage in Times Square, organizers openly called for the release of several high-profile Islamic terrorists — figures with long, documented histories of militancy, extremist leadership, and direct involvement in violence.

Open Calls to Free Convicted Terrorists

One of those figures was Yasin Malik, the violent leader of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) and once the most visible face of the armed insurgency in Kashmir. In the early 1990s, Malik played a central role in the JKLF’s campaign of kidnappings, targeted killings, and armed attacks on Indian security forces.

In 2022, he was convicted in a New Delhi court of terrorism-financing, conspiracy to wage war against India, and other serious offenses after pleading guilty to charges brought under India’s Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. Indian investigators tied him to funding networks that routed money from Pakistan-based operatives to fuel unrest and violence in Kashmir. The JKLF itself has been banned in India as an “unlawful association” for its role in terrorism and separatist militancy, and Malik remains one of the most notorious figures in the region’s insurgent history.

Another was Asiya Andrabi, the militant leader of the banned extremist group Dukhtaran-e-Millat — a radical Islamist women’s organization in Jammu & Kashmir that has openly called for the region’s full merger with Pakistan, enforced Taliban-style restrictions on women, and publicly praised global jihadists, including al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Andrabi has long been accused by Indian authorities of maintaining operational links with Pakistan-based terror groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Hizbul Mujahideen. She has been arrested multiple times on charges ranging from sedition to unlawful activities, and in 2018 was booked under India’s Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act for allegedly waging war against the state.

Also named was Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, a senior figure in the All Parties Hurriyat Conference and one of the most prominent separatist leaders in Jammu & Kashmir. He has been repeatedly placed under house arrest or detained by Indian authorities over suspected links to Pakistan-backed separatist networks and for his role in mobilizing anti-India agitation in the Valley.

Nuclear Brinkmanship in Midtown Manhattan

The most alarming moment came when a speaker escalated the rhetoric to the nuclear threshold, addressing international actors directly: “We demand that the United Nations and U.S. President Donald Trump please solve the Kashmir issue as soon as possible. Otherwise, there will be a nuclear war between two neighboring countries, Pakistan and India… All occupations can be finished within a minute if the White House takes a stand on the right side.”

In any other context, an explicit public warning of nuclear conflict, voiced in midtown Manhattan, would draw swift attention from counterterrorism watchers and headline editors alike. Here, it passed largely unnoticed. This nuclear brinkmanship was reinforced by repeated invocations of Pakistan’s military sacrifice, vows from former Pakistani army officers to “embrace the challenge” against India, and direct calls for American Muslim communities to “join hands” with the Kashmiri cause, language calculated to mobilize the diaspora as a political weapon in Pakistan’s global confrontation with India.

That silence is part of the story. Despite the rally’s open alignment with a foreign government’s talking points, the presence of a previously convicted unregistered foreign agent at the microphone, the overt championing of convicted or banned separatist leaders, and the extraordinary invocation of nuclear war on U.S. soil, no major American outlet reported on the event.

The pattern is clear: domestic media often frames such gatherings as generic “human-rights protests,” seldom scrutinizing the organizers’ networks or state ties; newsrooms shy from coverage that could invite accusations of bias or Islamophobia; and enforcement of foreign-influence transparency is uneven when activity is routed through diaspora groups rather than formal diplomatic channels.

Seen in full, the Times Square demonstration was not merely a protest but a public-relations operation, ideologically aligned with Islamabad and executed through diaspora nodes that have long served as force multipliers. Times Square offered more than foot traffic; it offered a production set, camera-ready scenes for placement in sympathetic outlets abroad, and for circulating within transnational activist channels. The rhetoric, including the call to free Yasin Malik and Asiya Andrabi and the portrayal of Kashmir solely through the lens of Indian “occupation,” fit seamlessly into that distribution pipeline.

A Blind Spot Foreign Actors Exploit

What unfolded in New York is thus a warning in plain sight. Foreign political warfare, complete with extremist alignments and nuclear brinkmanship, can be staged openly in America’s public squares, leveraging our free-speech environment to advance a state narrative while escaping serious scrutiny. That it occurred at the center of the nation’s media capital without making a ripple in major U.S. outlets is not just a missed story; it is evidence of a blind spot that foreign actors have learned to exploit.

If policymakers, journalists, and the public fail to treat these events as what they are, coordinated and dangerous influence campaigns, not simply spontaneous assemblies, the next “rally” will arrive with slicker production, sharper recruitment, and even fewer questions asked.

For India, this should serve as proof that Pakistan’s anti-India agenda is global in scope, exported, amplified, and disguised as “human rights” advocacy on foreign soil. For the U.S. and its allies, it is a warning that open societies are being used as staging grounds for hostile state narratives, fronted by diaspora networks and individuals with direct or historic ties to militant movements. These campaigns exploit the very free-speech protections that Pakistan itself denies its own citizens, turning Western liberties into tools of foreign political warfare.

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