In another country, it was a news item that would have dominated the news media. It was a news item that would have swallowed whole other top-of-the-hour news items and spit out their bones.
While discussing “pro-establishment, anti-India” militant groups in the Punjab, the provincial law minister Rana Sanaullah said that it would be difficult for there to be action against groups where “the state is involved.”
Sanaullah thus became the senior-most Pakistani official to have admitted on record what the Indians have been alleging since a very long time. That the Pakistani deep state is harbouring militants that carry out attacks in other countries. Though India isn’t the only country saying this. Afghanistan also alleges the same, except that it has a far greater complaint than India.
This presents, in a different light, an older reality. Rana Sanaullah’s detractors — and there are many, including yours truly — point out his links with proscribed organisations. We used to be seething with rage whenever the odd picture of his with the leadership of a banned organisation used to surface.
But the problem here is that the deep state has shaped such a polity where even relatively liberal political forces cannot operate in the great outdoors without some sort of understanding with this lot. The PPP, though not quite as close to these elements as the League, cannot claim to be completely innocent in this regard. A top-level MQM’s delegation famously went to the offices of ASWJ in Karachi in what insiders reported was a kowtowing session. The ANP, with a TTP crosshairs on their flag , was completely wiped out from Karachi and near-decimated in KP and Baluchistan. Theirs is a reminder of how you don’t want to cross this lot if you want the freedom to move around and do your thing.
Terrorism, we are rightly told by our military establishment and political governments, is the biggest problem the country is facing today. Yet, developments in this biggest problem take a back seat in our media. We have an appalling lack of information about what, exactly, is happening in the Zarb-e-Azb operation. The well argued litany of complaints that neighbouring states give against us is glossed over, even in the few foreign-affairs-only talk shows that we have. The very media players completely enamoured with the military establishment, however, refrains from reporting on the war against terror to begin with.
The media circus currently in full sway because of the Panama Leaks is understandable. It was news all over the world. But if we’ve established that there is nothing illegal about the offshore accounts themselves, but a case of how the prime minister’s family got this money, we have relegated the issue to the same corruption issue that the family has been facing in the past; nothing new. That doesn’t absolve them and, as the opposition parties are demanding, a commission should indeed be set up to investigate the money trail. But this more-of-the-same is eating away into coverage of other issues.
The Pakistani media would be investigating the bogeyman of corruption if we’re faced with floods, terrorists or hostile extraterrestrial life-forms.
