Deja vu. The events that this column attempts to handle are eerily similar to a sequence of events two years ago. The same federal capital. A similar siege. By the same gallery of undesirables from within the clergy.
And a similar gag order, of sorts, on the broadcast media. Resulting in a situation where consumers of mass media in the rest of the country don’t understand the gravity of the drama playing out in Islamabad.
Last time, it was the massive protest that followed the hanging of Mumtaz Qadri. And this time round, it is the protests against a perception that there might be a lessening of the state ostracisation of the country’s Ahmadi community. These protests are led, in part, by the charmingly eloquent Khadim Hussein Rizvi.
Instead of reinventing the wheel, let the Tube quote from an earlier piece of his (decide, dear reader, which action is more pretentious: referring to oneself in the third person or quoting oneself liberally.)
From the piece on 5th March, 2016. “[The gag order] provides the country’s liberal intelligentsia with a bit of a conundrum. On one hand, they realise the problem that live coverage of the event can prove to be. A well-crafted funeral sermon, replete with fire, brimstone and the kitchen sink, can have the potential to cause some serious damage. And the ensuing discussion on the media can pack a punch of its own.
But, on the flipside, banning such coverage is going to wrest away from the religious right the very things that we are supposed to be enticing them with. The freedom of expression. Democracy. The freedom to associate over your political beliefs.
It would be difficult to overcome the impulse of putting a gag order on the supporters of Qadri, not just for the country’s liberals but also for those large numbers of conservatives who nevertheless very much believe in the rule of law. But being part of a modern state means some tough, unpalatable decisions. We have to eat our vegetables, so to speak.
For liberal democrats to be supporting such restrictions on the media is akin to the light-in-the-head “liberals” who believe dictatorship is bad but Musharraf was good. It is only when you realise that their hatred of Zia-ul-Haq stems not from his taking over a democratically elected government and executing a prime minister but only because he was socially conservative, do you realise that they are not really anti-Zia after all.
Hate speech, certainly, is to be banned. So is incitement to violence. And there are many techniques that can be used to ensure that such offending segments are immediately filtered out. And that should be good enough.
Two channels, Samaa TV and Neo TV, have been slapped with a fine for giving coverage to the funeral. Though these channels should have still obeyed the law, it is unfair that they should have had to go cough up this money or even be censured like this.
In the presence of such a blanket shut-down, the reactionary forces are gaining ground, not losing it. Take the example of former Justice Nazir Akhtar, whose flimsy arguments challenging the legality of the case against Qadri, are being made viral online. Though they might be taken on by social media activists from the other side of the spectrum, it still isn’t enough. It would have been effective if, in a live TV discussion, analysts had blown such arguments to bits.”
It is highly unlikely that the ban in question has been enforced by the government. Eking out a consensus from among the channels is like trying to herd cats. Even the supposedly pro-government channels don’t give the government quite the cooperation that the likes of parties like the PTI would have you believe.
It is strongly suspected that the military would have also been involved in ensuring the cooperation of the press corps. (Conspiracy theorists’ section: Does that take the wind away from the theory that it is the military orchestrating all this or does it further embolden that theory? Please discuss. 20 marks.)
The gag order has led to a strange situation where a situation potentially more dangerous that the party of 2014 is going by unnoticed, except by the hapless residents of Islamabad and Rawalpindi. And the sitting government.
