A government seizes copies of a publication, and orders its publishers to paste a blank sticker on each copy of the publication (all of the nearly 30,000 of them) to cover what it deems is an inaccurate map of one of its provinces; the province has an insurgency underway and is an issue of contention with a neighbouring state.
The government in question, however, is not that of one of the repressive Arab states, the ones that go about fining publications for using Persian Gulf where they wanted to use Arab Gulf. It is not the government of the nascent democracy of Pakistan, where presenting an alternative to the state’s security paradigm, at least till very recently, could get journalists in a very tough spot. The government in question is that of the largest democracy in the world.
“India is meant to be a democracy that approves of freedom of speech,” says the editor-in-chief of The Economist. “But they take a much more hostile attitude on this matter than either Pakistan or China.” The matter being the Kashmir region. The magazine is adamant that it merely produced an accurate and impartial map of the region based on the actual dispensation of power between the three states that claim the whole or a part of the province.
The hardliners the Pakistani side of the border need to realise that our moral and legal arguments on Kashmir notwithstanding, the province is, at the moment, internationally recognised to be a part of India; orchestrating a military insurgency there would be against international law. Similarly, the Indians would do well to realise that the issue is very much disputed and this status of dispute itself is also internationally recognised. That the people of Kashmir aren’t too endeared to the Republic of India and that the world isn’t compelled to view the problem like they do.
It is not becoming of an open democracy to be practicing censorship of the sort. As Pakistan and its citizens know from experience, the biggest victims of press suppression are not journalists but the people of the country.
The truth can never damage a cause that is just, the spiritual father of modern India once said. The map-covering hysteria perhaps reveals an internal guilt regarding the bleak injustice meted out to the people of Kashmir.
Just because the magazine has been told to hide its content in Pakistan does not mean that the world does not know about it. Pakistani abroad have seen it. Who does this censorship benefit? Absolutely no one – in one form or the other the information will come to Pakistan. Of course the Internet is the fastest people can smuggle the publication in the country and there is nothing our authorities can about it. Isolationism seems to be a preferred policy. Keeping the world is never going save Pakistan. Censorship does not prevent anything from happening.
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