A pernicious attack on press freedom

KARACHI: Monday’s melee in front of the Karachi Press Club that left three photographers of TV channels grievously injured is a real slap on our body politic. The attack on photographers, who were pounced on and injured by none other than the protesting strikers at a hunger strike camp while they were performing their assigned legitimate duties, is a dangerous portent for times to come.

It shows the scant regard for the freedom of the press which the media won after a long struggle against the ways of the dictatorial regimes, when, in 1986, Prime Minister Junejo’s government, with a stroke of the pen, totally unshackled the press and it was almost as free as the press in countries like the United Kingdom, a mighty achievement indeed.

However, Monday’s bedlam proves that we are back to square one. The culprit, however, is not the state apparatus but political parties.

There have been a whole lot of cases in the recent past when workers of political parties went on the rampage roughing up journalists. Worse still, there have been vested interests and business mafias that have, reportedly, not even stopped short of eliminating journalists like the killing of Wali Khan Babar in 2011.

Monday evening’s mayhem was one such example where reportedly a political party’s hunger strikers turned on the mediafolk covering the strike of the party and pasted them good and proper.

The troubles started with a call by the London-based head of the party to his followers to attack the offices of three TV channels. According to the TV footage, these workers were “most obediently yours” and attacked a TV channel right away, barging into its offices, damaging furniture and other equipment and subjecting the workers of the channel to threats and even assault. They just ransacked the channel.

The effects of the mayhem spilt over to outside the offices and the Fowara Chowk was the scene of the burning of police mobiles and other vehicles with thick black fumes of smoke rising from the place. Police resorted to tear gas shelling and long after the troubles subsided, the place was still reeking of the odour of choking gas, with hooded commandos patrolling the place.

As a result of the violent clash, the hunger strikers’ camp which had been there for the last six days was dismantled. However, an uneasy calm enveloped the Karachi Press Club area till late in the night.

Harried journalists began bundling into the press club. Apart from the grievous injuries to people and the massive damage of equipment and property, what Monday evening’s clash brings to light is the vulnerability of the mediafolk to the tantrums of political parties’ followers gone berserk. The authorities will certainly have to pull up their socks to protect the workers of the vital fourth pillar of state, the press, from the wrath of the political workers gone berserk.

The mayhem caused traffic imbroglios for long distances on Sharea Faisal, I I Chundrigar Road and Dr Ziauddin Ahmed Road.