Well on the road to chaos

Islamabad diary
Does a death-wish afflict this country? At what point will the government, the army and the media cry enough is enough? Where will they halt? Or must another October come their way before some sense is instilled into their heated minds?
This affair which has the country in its grip, and which has already paralysed whatever semblance of government we have, has flared into the kind of societal civil war we have not known for a long time. The 1977 movement against Bhutto saw a polarisation as sharp and vicious. Mercifully, there were no private TV channels back then. The intensity of what we are now seeing is magnified many times over by the power of television – nonsense and drivel, hate and poison, and no shortage of plain illiteracy flowing seamlessly into every household, under that inspiring label: freedom of expression, which in our hands looks like nothing so much as a razor in the hands of a monkey.
Let me repeat for the hundredth time what most of us in the media find so hard to accept: the freedom of the electronic media, the senseless proliferation of different channels, was not won by any sensational struggle at the barricades. Of all the myths held dear by the journalistic community this is the funniest, and the most ill-founded.
This was a gift – seems like a poisoned chalice now – bestowed freely, under no pressure except from his own ego, by a military dictator. And I sometimes think that because the media forgot where this gift came from, it is being punished for its ingratitude.
I used to write so much against that figure in uniform, week after week. But as a journalist I started earning respectable money – sufficient for my Black Label and other necessary expenses – only under his watch when one channel after the other hit the airwaves. But swept by the tide of our democratic enthusiasm we turned the very weapon placed in our hands against the provider. This was during the lawyers’ movement when, like Wordsworth, we cried out: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive…But to be young was very heaven.”
We became further democrats when the dictator, fallen from grace, was charged with treason…and we the greatest beneficiaries of his gift called the loudest for his blood. And now, because of no martial law regulation, we are falling upon our swords and making a spectacle of ourselves. How do we explain this? What does it amount to? Alone of an evening, with something on a table close by, I am tempted to think of this gladiatorial show as ‘the revenge of the general’. We tempted the furies and are getting our own back, and from the high horse of our puffed-up arrogance are fallen.
No drama could have a more imposing cast: government, army, ISI, the media, the religious card, self-righteous indignation, patriotism, national security. But where the government should be taking the lead part in this Greek chorus it is standing to one side, nurturing an impression of partisanship. I get a sinking feeling whenever information minister Pervaiz Rashid comes on television. Why does he always look as if he’s got something to hide?
As if all this was not enough our hallowed halls of justice are now being dragged into this affair. Happening to see a TV programme on Wednesday evening I could hardly believe my ears, such was the language used and the charges hurled – I dare not say against whom – for partisanship and conflict of interest. This seems to be a spreading fire, more and more things being touched by the flames.
Where will this stop? For unless something is done, some fire-fighting mechanism put in place, this has all the potential of getting out of hand. Positions have been taken so firmly that it’s now becoming a matter of life-and-death for the protagonists. The Ministry of Law, whose dual charge the information minister holds, has lobbed the ball in Pemra’s court, the regulatory body. But the government while paying lip-service to Pemra’s authority is effectively not allowing it to function. The ex-officio members, all under the government’s thumb, are not attending its meetings. So the stalemate continues.
I was under the impression, mistaken as it now turns out, that the ISI wouldn’t be able to push matters so far. But it has piled on the pressure, driving both the government and the channel concerned into a corner. Whatever else may be the consequences of this crisis – for crisis it now is – the government seems to have lost the ability to function. I have attended two TV talk shows in the last two days and in both the question asked most insistently was: where is the government?
And things have suddenly flared up in North Waziristan and there is an invitation to consider from Delhi regarding attendance at Narendra Modi’s swearing in. Left to his own devices the PM would not waste a minute accepting this invitation. But in the present situation there is the army’s reaction to consider. If nothing else, eyebrows will be raised in that quarter should the PM hasten to make this trip.
This abdication of responsibility, breakdown of authority, we can afford at no time, and certainly not at this juncture when so much is happening and so much is about to happen, new dispensations to east and west and the Americans departing Afghanistan. This was time for some unity of purpose. What we are seeing are society and polity fractious and divided. If government and army can’t be on civil terms with each other, all because of a lousy media crisis, it doesn’t say much for the statesmanship available to us.
We have to be clear about one thing. The army is not about to back down, not when for the first time in years it has a good part of the public behind it. So a way out has to be found. If the government sticks to its guns it will be the ultimate loser. It doesn’t take much higher mathematics to figure this out.
Don’t we see the optics on display? When the army chief visits Islamabad there he is on a chair next to the PM, his generals on one side, a bevy of ministers on the other side. In most other countries everyone would be sitting around a table, blurring such distinctions as rise to the fore in our setting. But this is now the reality and the PM through his handling, or rather non-handling, of the media crisis has brought this on himself.
The way some TV channels are out of anyone’s control is a sign of (a) the diminution of federal authority and (b) the chaos to which we seem to be headed. Army and ISI are playing the political field and there’s nothing the government can do about it. If this situation lasts it’s going to be drip-drip-drip leading to a further weakening of federal government writ. And, to repeat the point made earlier, all because of a lousy media crisis.
And to think that when the razor was in our monkey hands we fancied that a new Pakistan had been born in which the authoritarian ghosts of the past had been exorcised forever. Never did reality make a swifter comeback, the euphoria of the monkey subsiding in little more than four weeks. That’s about all that it has taken for the media to slip from the towering branches overhead and come head first to the ground.
But enough of this…we better find a solution fast or the game will be up. We have to travel no further than Egypt or Thailand to see this as a distinct possibility.
Email: winlust@yahoo.com