Our legislative dilemma

In its Saturday Essay feature, Wall Street Journal reminded me of a most useful point; every complex question has an answer that is easy, simple and wrong. This seems tailor made for you guessed it, an overwhelming majority of the talk shows aired on the plethora of Pakistani news channels.
The electronic media in Pakistan has, for the most part, done to discourse what Twitter has done to language; import an almost undesirable simplicity and remove nuance. To be fair, both Twitter and Pakistani media have done a lot of good as well but the lack of nuance is a tragedy I cannot ignore.
I am still not clear whether most talk shows hosts are supposed to be impartial or are they unabashed ideologues pushing a certain viewpoint? There is nothing inherently wrong with a biased talk show – as long as the host makes the bias known and drops pretences of impartiality.
Talk shows seem to feed into the age-old fetish of simple solutions. The alleged experts who are invited on to these shows often end up quoting themselves since anyone else lacks credibility. We are told about enormously complex social and economic issues and then the guests are asked, “what is the solution?” in a five minute sound-bite. And people who appear as experts on most shows actually do think that five minutes are all they need to present a solution. This tragedy is also apparent in the many emails I receive after most columns; “you did not propose a solution.” Asking questions is apparently not enough. There is, ostensibly, little merit in debate because we need simple solutions. Most experts seem to think that corruption is the root of all evil – let history, context and any comparative analysis be damned. Feed the people what they want to hear. If corruption is what bothers these experts and the media then killing nuance is yet another form of corruption.
Apart from the lack of nuance, another pervasive feature is the skewed definition of who counts as an expert. Now, don’t get me wrong. Everyone should have the right to partake in the discussion about laws and constitutional provisions but everyone should not have the right to do that while pretending to be an expert. In the debate on the Domestic Violence Bill many civil society activists just ended up sounding silly since a) they were too busy screaming to ensure they heard nothing but the sound of their own voices and b) they chose simplistic jingoism rather than nuance. One’s argument, whatever it maybe, sounds more credible if one confronts the counter-argument. The many NGO activists were far too busy painting anyone opposing the law as patriarchal conservatives. That might have been true in a minority of cases but a lot of people had legitimate reservations about the vague language of the legislation. But none of this was acceptable to the NGO activists since they had the “right solution” – their fetish of a solution being fulfilled.
The fact that they were shunned by a female Speaker of the National Assembly and courageous female parliamentarians who sponsored the said legislation speaks volumes about the damage that many NGO activists did to the discourse. Forget moral stances. Just think effective lobbying. Alienating the representatives of the people and the people themselves through aggressive posturing was never going to help. I am not sure what makes anyone a liberal in Pakistan but most of these NGO activists call themselves liberal. But the total lack of civility displayed by many of them on talk shows seemed to confirm recent research in the US that liberals often display lack of patience to listen to conservatives. This noisy allegedly liberal rant was joined by many talk show hosts who, apart from limited exceptions, seemed to have decided that any objectors to the legislation were to be given little airtime.
I have been raised by a ferociously independent Pathan mother who taught me respect for women before anything else that I can remember. I have not been raised to be a conservative when it comes to women’s rights. But many independent and secure women would side with me on the argument that rights are better secured when people are actually willing to make an argument rather than pretend that they have come up with the one-magical solution to the problem of domestic violence. Criminalise domestic violence if you want but be smart about it. Your egos may be satisfied if a badly drafted highly contentious version of the law is passed but laws are not self-enforcing. Laws that divide societies often cause just as many problems as they solve. The most telling news? Your rants actually ensured the legislation didn’t get passed during this session of Parliament.
Now we are also hearing about a campaign to criminalise forced conversions to Islam. Forced conversions are a real problem but criminalising the practice is likely to hurt non-Muslims even more. I promise to write more on this soon but sadly the NGO activists are not likely to engage in this debate either. Anyone opposing them is labelled conservative and opponent of the status quo. The media’s lack of willingness and ability to question the loopholes in the case made by NGO activists skews the debate.
It is rather torturous for a lawyer to be watching every Tom, Dick and Harry dissecting provisions of proposed legislation with no need to receive input from someone who actually went to a law school. You need not be a conservative to see the loopholes in the rigid arguments of NGO activists on TV.
God will help these alleged liberals the day conservatives get their act together and bring intelligent lawyers on board. Looking silly is hardly the way to gain support for important legislation. Coming up with simplistic arguments is not going to do them any favors either. But then again since when did I, a mere mortal, gain the right to tell anything to the oh-we-have-it-all-figured-out NGO brigade? What I do promise to do is to give each one of their inane arguments the strong rebuttals that they deserve.

The writer is a Barrister and an Advocate of the High Courts. He is currently pursuing his LL.M in the US and can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @wordoflaw