In his trimonthly report to the colonial administration in 1940, the Commissioner of Delhi declared the Jang as an infamous mouthpiece of the All India Muslim League. This colonial accusation that went down in history as an honour to Jang’s credibility for voicing for the rights of the oppressed, is often labelled as troublemaking or incitement by insecure power seekers. Despite numerous obstacles, Jang and its founder Mir Khalil-ur-Rahman adhered to an undeterred spirit and became a beacon of light for freedom of expression and resistance against authoritarianism, after independence.
The country’s history is fraught with the policies and attempts of the state to stifle free speech. In the first seven years of independence from 1947 to 1953, 31 newspapers were banned for different periods including literary magazines like Naqoosh, Savera and Adab-e-Latif.
The military government of Ayub Khan forcefully took over Progressive Papers Limited (PPL). In June 1961, the Associated Press of Pakistan was taken over by Ayub Khan because of its pathetic financial condition and established National Press Trust (NPT) to enhance the quality of journalism. The NPT owned about 11 newspapers in English, Urdu and Bengali in six major cities of united Pakistan (east and west). The Press Information Department (PID) played a key role in feeding information fitting to the government or scrubbing content which threatened their credibility in public.
In 1971, when the country lost its eastern wing, the press was asked to follow the line of the central government. A flicker of hope shone when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto constituted the first elected government of Pakistan; however, the hope blew sky-high when the press dejectedly found itself in chains again. The government cancelled the new print quota of Jang, and issued show cause notices to several newspapers including Nawa-i-Waqt and Imroz, in 1972. “The Sun”, Karachi was also banned in July of the same year, under Press & Publication Ordinance (PPO), 1963. The government stopped the national advertisements to the “Dawn”, and many other newspapers were penalised through curtailment of the newsprint quota.
The decade of the 1980s made it tough for journalists to pen the truth. General Zia-ul-Haq dismissed nine senior journalists working in Imroz, Pakistan Times and Mashriq and three newspapers of NPT in Lahore for signing a memorandum demanding to end the atrocities on the Sindhi population in 1983. The press was controlled by the promulgation of Martial Law Regulations and by incorporating several amendments to the Pakistan Penal code (PPC). During the martial law of Zia-ul-Haq, newspapers were scrutinised before printing in the information department, which used to stamp out the pieces of the newspapers including a critique of the government. Despite knowing that authorities would remove the critical parts of the newspapers, editors deliberately sent those pages to let authorities delete them and the deleted part would be published blank, tipping the public the wink about the government’s censorship. However, authorities gauged this tactic and directed newspapers to prepare the content beforehand to replace the deleted spaces on the pages.
When the arbitrary crackdown by the military ruler Zia-ul-Haq, was jacked up in the 1980s, Mir Khalil-ur-Rahman (MKR) buoyed up his reporters and editors to set aside their hesitations and pursue their responsibilities with honesty and dedication.
“Once I wrote a critical piece on the government of Ayub Khan, and he purged Mir Khalil-ur-Rahman and withdrew the license of the newspaper worth Rs 10 lacs, which was recently granted by the government. But MKR never questioned me for the loss my work had caused his periodical. I have worked with Mir Saheb for a long time, but I never saw him interfering in the work of his sub-editors, and it was unusual in the history of journalism, that as an Editor I worked with complete authority.” Former editor of Jang, Syed Muhammad Taqi, the then editor of Jang reminisced about those difficult times.
With the turn of the century in 2000, nothing changed, democracy was still at a halt under a military coup spearheaded by General (retd) Musharraf (1999-2007). However, this time, the media industry witnessed advancement and mushroom growth of private media channels. But again, the government could not mask its discontentment towards freedom of expression; in 2007, channels received a show-cause notice stating that “No programme shall be aired which contains, (a) aspersions against the judiciary and the armed forces (b) any material amounting to contempt of court (c) contain any abusive comments that when taken in context, tend to or are likely to expose any individual or group or a class of individuals to hatred or contempt.”
After 2008, when political pendulum set on democracy and the PPP’s government took over the reins of government followed by PML-N in 2012, dictations and objections from power centres still poured in the newsrooms.
When PTI came to power in 2018, free and fair journalism again suffered in Pakistan. The involvement and interference of the establishment increased, newspapers and TV channels were censored, and many turned to self-censorship, the Dawn and Jang Media Group were ripped off government advertisements, journalists were attacked, and political parties and establishment ran hate campaigns against journalists on a social media site, Twitter. State television PTV was also used as a party wing. Geo TV was temporarily forced off the air in July 2019 as a punishment for its critical reporting on the government. In March 2020, Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman, owner and editor-in-chief of the Jang group, was detained in Lahore by the National Accountability Bureau (NAB). Consequently, unemployed journalists set up their own YouTube accounts and used Twitter and Facebook to air their views. Women journalists, who were critical of the government, faced digital harassment, threats, and sexist and abusive hashtags against them were among the top trends on Twitter, created by PTI’s supporters.
In 2021, Removal and Blocking of Unlawful Online Content (procedure, oversight and safeguards) Rules 2021 were enacted for the blocking and regulating of online content on social media forums. The section further provides that such content shall be blocked, and removed when PTA considered it as a violation of the glory and interest of Islam, defence, security and integrity of Pakistan, public order, decency or morality, or concerning contempt of court or commission of or incitement of an offence relating to data protection or cybercrime.
In February 2022, the PTI government promulgated an ordinance to amend the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act, 2016 (PECA) to counter fake news, defamation and propaganda on social media. Fortunately, in 2022, the Islamabad High Court revoked the PECA Amendment Ordinance but did not overrule a part of Section 20 of the Act which warns against the harm of information. PECA was enforced by the PML-N government in 2016, which was then warned by the opposition amid the misuse of the law against freedom of expression but when in power, who pays heed to reality? When the PTI government hopped on the bandwagon of a continued clampdown on free speech, its own members suffered eventually under the same laws they eagerly endorsed. The cases of detention of Shahbaz Gill and Azam Swati by FIA are relevant instances.
On October 23, 2022, the news of the cold-blooded murder of a renowned journalist, Arshad Sharif, residing in Kenya shook the country. The brutal killing for unknown reasons laid bare the fact that how difficult it is to stand by truth or be critical of the status quo in this country. According to the Freedom Network’s Annual Impunity Report (2022), between 2012 and 2022, 53 journalists were assassinated, with conviction of criminals in only two cases and 96 per cent of the cases remained unresolved. In October 2022, an amendment to the FIA Act, 1974, armed the institution with powers to hound social media disinformers, propagandists, hatemongers and the runners of smear drives against the state institutions. This legislation came at a time when political parties, institutions and civil society were already calling for a dialogue among the primary institutions of the state to strengthen democracy and put an end to the power struggle or political engineering in the country. However, when this will happen, is just a dream for every journalist and every Pakistani who wants to uphold truth.