Father of the ‘modern’ Pakistani media

Islamabad diary

I’ve put commas around ‘modern’ because if Pakistani television fare is modern, we’ll have to redefine the term. So modern in this context means not advanced or progressive in thought – that would be something – but merely of this time. Enough said, let’s move to the main discourse.

Once upon a time, and how long ago it seems, the face of the media was not the TV screen as it is today but the newspaper page. In fact the media did not exist. We just had the press and that was it. TV was Pakistan Television or PTV, and it had two things to offer: the 9 0’clock news which you watched because there was nothing else to watch, and dramas, some of them surprisingly good, in fact much better than anything you could catch from across the border.

There’s no point wallowing in nostalgia but it gives a small lift to the spirits to remember that good things were happening in Pakistan at that time. Making progress in many fields, it seemed as if the future was ours. But the leadership of the time blundered into the damaging adventure of the 1965 war…and so malign was its influence, a war fought for no purpose, at least none discernible to the mortal eye, that the Pakistani dream went sour, and the country which had seemed to be doing so well went from crisis to crisis.

Where is the pir, the khanqah or the mazar going to whom or which can put the country on the right track and exorcise the memory of those adventures past? Discovering that holy altar should be the foremost national necessity. All others can wait.

But back to our story…the media was the press and TV was just an evening hobby, indeed a hobby for some hours of the evening before the lights went out, which indeed, come to think of it, was a far more sensible way of going about the business than the present 24 hour cycle of non-stop hysteria and nonsense. If anything is calculated to dull and mediocratise the senses it is the fare now dished out by a host of channels day and night, their number now threatening to cross all reasonable limits.

And the father of it all, who waved the flag and made it all possible, was no titan of democracy, no tribune of the people, but a dictator in uniform, one Gen Pervez Musharraf. Not that we knights of the media would readily concede this awkward fact because it flies in the face of all our carefully-nurtured fantasies. We say with a straight face that what the media is today, myriad channels and bumper salaries, is because of ‘our struggle’.

There was Hitler’s biography, Mein Kampf – My Struggle – and there is the fantasy assiduously cultivated and promoted by sword-bearers of the Pakistani media – Our Struggle. Hitler’s was no work of fiction. Our Struggle, however, is largely a work of fiction – expounding the doctrine that the collective folly of our many TV channels came about because of the “struggle” of the journalistic fraternity. In the hall of Pakistani fiction there is no fiction greater than this.

In the face of awkward reality there is another fiction peddled by the fraternity that even if Gen Musharraf did what he did, he had no choice because the march of new technology made it impossible to police and block cyberspace. Go to Saudi Arabia, to Iran, to North Korea and see if cyberspace is unpoliceable.

Musharraf had the power of control, the power to limit and ration the award of TV channels. But unlike democrats and dictators before him, the idea of a free media appealed to him because 1) he was confident before the cameras himself and was the first Pakistani ruler to address a live press conference and 2) most of the press, not that anyone would care to remember this now, had welcomed his takeover.

In time indeed the media became so free under Musharraf that it became a fashion for even usually prudent and pusillanimous journalists to speak out against military rule and denounce dictatorship. They wouldn’t so much as mention the MQM by name – that was too risky and dangerous. But they would froth at the mouth about the evils of military rule.

Because avenues of employment multiplied, for the first time in their experience large numbers of journalists started earning not only a decent wage but, as time went by, an attractive wage. Journalism before Musharraf’s time was a byword for genteel and respectable poverty. You entered journalism not for the money, because there was precious little money in it, but for ‘higher things’ – idealism and all that. Today, thanks to the TV channels churning out non-stop nonsense, it is a lucrative profession, more attractive in the eyes of the beholder than the army or the civil service.

What brought this about was no assault on the Bastille, as some of the older members of the fraternity like to believe in their more sentimental moments – when the cup of nostalgia is full and reality wears a romantic cloak – but the diktat or whim of a dictator. His other sins were perhaps many and for some of them he has already answered, disgrace and contumely being more potent forms of punishment than trial and sentencing by a court. But his role as godfather of the ‘modern’ Pakistani media is not to be obscured except by forgetful memory.

He said let it flourish and proliferate, and the media so proliferated, to our collective profit and loss. It is good to have a media with so much choice and diversity. It is pernicious – the death of reason – to have a media whose governing standard is such unvarnished mediocrity. I suppose that’s what life is, the good and the bad mixed up in this fashion.

And Musharraf lived to rue the consequences of his liberality. The lawyers’ movement which fatally undermined his rule would never have become the octopus it did but for the power of the TV cameras trained on the dancing and prancing lawyers as they shouted ‘Musharraf ka jo yaar hai, ghadar hai, ghadar hai’ – he who is a friend of Musharraf is a traitor, is a traitor – and the other one I remember most fondly ‘Chief tere jaanisar, beshumar, beshumar’ – Chief (CJ Iftikhar Ch) those ready to die for you, innumerable, innumerable.

Lawyers in their hundreds would be transformed by the magic of TV cameras into the tens of thousands. The nation watched entranced this heady spectacle. And there was not a thing that Musharraf could do, the genie he himself had let out of the bottle coming to haunt him.

The lawyers’ movement is a distant memory. So much else has come and gone. But the encouraging and lucrative salaries ushered in by Musharraf’s media revolution remain. Not all in the media are Walter Cronkites. But the industry as a whole is more comfortable than it used to be.

I have said it before, let me say it again. At least once a year the corps of anchors should stand before a portrait of the general and, in Japanese fashion, pay him homage. He is the father of their golden age.

Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com