Purging our appetite to purge

Pakistan’s Minister of State for Information Technology, Anusha Rehman, has said that she wants to purge the internet of objectionable material. If the internet were a near-finite place where we could go raging in, like Genghis Khan, and burn it down, we Pakistanis would have done that already. The truth is that we can’t. The internet is not Baghdad, and despite our medieval appetite for destruction, producing a Genghis Khan might not be in Pakistan’s DNA. We’re not fighters. We’re lovers.
What this means is that we are left to assess Minister Rehman’s quest for a purge of the internet as the longings of a kind, decent and innocent woman who simply wants to live in a society where we don’t have to deal with vileness online. No one should grudge the minister or millions of other Pakistanis, like me, our revulsion at vileness. I am personally disgusted by many things I find on the internet, but I have discovered a wonderful little something called ‘Close Window’ and ‘Shut Down’. With these tools, I am artfully able to reject the onslaught of revolting, objectionable material on the internet.
At some point in our love-hate relationship with the internet in Pakistan, we have decided that instead of choosing not to engage with hatred, we must find ways to shut hatred down. Wanting to live in a world where powerful people like Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg would simply do as told by a Pakistani minister of state is nothing to be ashamed of. But perhaps being so out of touch with reality that we are unable to keep this secret desire to ourselves is less forgivable.
Too often, the halfway response we’ve developed is that if Pakistan was economically powerful, these problems would disappear. Pakistan may yet one day grow into a country so valuable from an economic standpoint that companies like Google, which owns YouTube, absolutely have to listen to us. Then, like Turkey, we would have the world at our feet.
But the lesson from Turkey since at least 2010 onwards is that being an economic powerhouse alone is not sufficient to make everybody do what you want them to do. The lesson from human history, from Islamic history, and from hundreds of years of physics, mathematics, anthropology, sociology and economics is also this – you can never, ever make everyone behave exactly as you want them to, all the time.
Our national institutions need to heed these lessons, instead of repeating past mistakes.
For years, we’ve had to deal with a military elite that refuses to acknowledge the agency of journalists and activists to speak out and identify deep structural problems as well as superficial operational problems in Pakistani national security thinking and acting. Our generals have developed much thicker skin since 2008 – in large part due to our evolving culture of 24/7 breaking news, and the outrageous failures in national security that are so plain and obvious to see that they pose a challenge to the bosses even inside the military.
Similarly, our courts are going through a massive transition. For years, the military-bureaucrat combine ensured little voice, tiny budgets and no agency to the judiciary. Ever since Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry put his foot down and refused to go quietly into the night in the face of Gen Musharraf’s bullying, the judiciary has enjoyed a wholly different kind of space to operate. This space has been a product of political goodwill, earned by the lawyers and judges in this country for their work in ridding the country of a military dictator. Yet just like dictators are often welcomed with rose petals and bid adieu with harsher implements, our judiciary now risks becoming its own martyr.
The Supreme Court deserves a certain degree of respect, as a national institution. But it cannot simply mute all criticism under the guise of laws such as contempt of court. It cannot do this because it is vitally important for the structural coherence and sustainability of the Pakistani state that respect for this institution and its symbols – our respected judges – is earned, not enforced.
What this means is that even if the chief justice and his fellow justices feel offended by criticism from writers like Babar Sattar, they must find ways to address the criticism without seeming to feel personally slighted.
Responsible commentators like Sattar can be right or they can be wrong. But they have to be able to engage in discussions about public accountability in the public domain. Without this vital instrument in our public discourse, we will risk doing to our newfound judicial independence and integrity what was once done to our military, to our bureaucracy and to our ravaged political system.
How does this relate to the internet?
In 2013, the public discourse is not restricted to these fine op-ed pages, or news tickers alone. It extends to social media, to the wider internet, and indeed to public spaces like street corners, parks and libraries.
Pakistan is not lush with an abundance of traditional public spaces like libraries. Increasingly, our young people use the internet as a proxy for those spaces. In many ways, the judiciary is a guardian of the public space. It needs to support an environment for Pakistanis in which self-expression, especially productive expression related to public accountability, is not hindered.
Instead, what we see evolving today is a twin-engine threat.
On the one hand, we have political leaders like Minister Rehman who have well-meaning but mistaken notions of what space on the internet means, and how public policy should respond to it. On the other, we have a superior judiciary that many perceive as being allergic to discussions about the justice system’s accountability.
When these two forces come together the only possible outcome will be the banning of things that shouldn’t be banned – because they cannot be contained through bans.
Websites containing religiously offensives material should not be rewarded with bans from Pakistan. They should be punished with irrelevance, as people simply refuse to indulge the offenders. Similarly, opinion pieces or speeches that call for greater judicial accountability should not be rewarded with reactions that deepen suspicion. Instead, they should be responded to with the confidence and openness of those who have nothing to hide and everything to give to Pakistan and its journey towards a strong, stable and secure nation.
That is the vision of a strong and independent Pakistani judiciary for which millions of us marched constantly between March 2007 and March 2009. That is the vision for which we thanked Almighty God outside Chief Justice Chaudhry’s residence under the stars of the night of March 16 and the early hours of March 17, 2009. Long live that vision and the strength of our institutions. Long live Pakistan.
The writer is an analyst and commentator.