Media Watch: Chup karo tum!

The first rule of a gunfight, they say, is “don’t be there.” After all, what is a nice boy like you doing in a gunfight?

Well, abstinence has become the best plan for religious debate as well. But it is not just the thorny religious issues that I am referring to, or the deeply sensitive ones. No, it seems that we can’t now discuss anything remotely, even tangentially, related to religion.

Consider the following video clip (online readers only) from the show Harf-e-Raz on Neo. The topic under discussion was the recent spate of incidents of harassment of women at rallies of the PTI. Now, all around the commentariat, the party was being pilloried for these incidents. Which was a bit unfair. The League had been using it for political mileage, which was understandable, given how the PTI itself has lowered the ethics of public political discourse in the recent past. But even the independent media, otherwise infatuated with the PTI, weren’t taking too kindly to it.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x49d4an_orya-maqbool-jan-blasted-on-anchor_news

The truth is that such behaviour happens everywhere in the country. There are limited safe public spaces for women in this fundamentally misogynist country. In the aforementioned program, Orya Maqbool Jan was pointing out that it wasn’t just the PTI’s rallies that such incidents happen in.

If you, dear reader, are having to adjust your glasses, because you just read Orya Maqbool Jan cogently point out a correct assessment of the situation, then don’t worry, because he will return to his usual self in the very next sentence. Happens all over the world, he said. Like the rape cases during the great power outage in New York — which is an urban legend in the US itself, despite no police record corroborating with it. He goes on to say that these are the problems with having makhlooth taqreebath — mixed gatherings.

Well, aren’t the rites at the Ka`aba itself performed by a makhloothgathering, asks the mild-mannered host. This is the point where our man Maqbool loses it. He screams at the host and says that it is blasphemous, what you have just said. The man tried to talk back, but Orya gives him a shut up call, quite literally chup karo tum! How can you compare such a sacred rite with a “club” — though no one had.

The problem: if Orya Maqbool Jan is genuinely in favour of gender-segregated societies and gatherings — and many people are, it seems — then he is entitled to hold forth his views in a civil manner. If an honest-to-God question somehow offended enough to get him worked up, he should still have avoided the word “blasphemy.” Pakistan is a country vectoring off towards a nightmarish version of a Monty Python movie. It takes very little to endanger people’s lives in this country.

Alas, we can’t expect such grace from the likes of Orya. They will pull out this tool whenever they are losing an argument and then pummel their opponents with it.

You can’t wean people off their meal ticket.