Censorship: between conservatives and liberals

Even after the remand and continuing trial of Gen Musharraf, few believed that the days of military encroachment over civilian governance were behind us. We aren’t just peoples with short memories or subjects of a culture of appeasement and compromise. Rather, intellectual dishonesty and political expediency has steered us into an ill-informed and self-righteous debate over civil-military relations.
Loosely used terms such as national honour, national interest, patriotism, jihad, sovereignty and even freedoms, have become ubiquitous power tools in a vocabulary of violence that has come to dominate our media. More than words and the abuse of such concepts as linguistic weapons, it has been the selective silence and self-censorship by all actors that has had a more damaging impact on Pakistan’s collective consciousness.
There’s something morbidly gratifying when conservative paranoids start crying ‘freedom’. In the wake of the murder attempt on Hamid Mir, Pakistan’s media conservatives have reinvented themselves as the new freedom fighters. Strangely, these are the same men who have historically opposed others’ freedom of expression and systematically maligned those who have exercised their right to express their disagreement and dissent.
The best tool to discredit any critic in Pakistan is to label them as a traitor and westernised informant who is sold-out to America and against ‘our’ national interest. Unfortunately, it’s not just the military media machine but even the journalist community that has used this deadly tool most effectively in Pakistan. Sadly, even the spokespeople of our democratic parties have been guilty of spewing such baseless paranoid accusation against opponents and critics all the time.
Calling for accountability of a state department then makes those individuals who are labelled ‘traitors’, easy targets. Isolating and accusing a civilian of being a traitor results in murder. This is not the same as criticising a policy, department or agency and the absurd idea that it causes some perceived hurt to the national morale or national honour is simply abstractions and excuses that betray a fragile ego and justifies aggressive forms of censorship.
Today, the nationalist hawks advocate for the most basic principle of western democracies – freedom of expression and the right to criticise the state and its policies. And they are right to do so, especially since the attack on freedoms is translating into attacks on lives. Except, it’s a right they would deny the Malalas, Taseers, Mukhtaras, Asma Jahangirs, NGOs working on child labour, women’s rights and human rights, as well as honour crime and rape victims.
According to such double standards, such conservatives have even complained of their views being censured in cases where they themselves are calling for censorship (of Indian TV programmes, YouTube, Malalas book, secular textbooks, ‘vulgarity’ as exemplified by women in the media but not male anchors, hate-spreading clerics, fatwa issuers, non-state actors etc.).
Unfortunately, the anti-conservatives don’t score much better in the debate over freedoms and censorship. Many supporters of freedom of expression will not move beyond smug gratification and the puerile chatter (through their new drawing rooms – Twitter and Facebook) about how Geo and the Jang group should repent their criticism of the ‘liberal’ PPP which has always been victim of establishment bullying and so on.
But such liberals have remained silent in the many cases of insider struggles within the PPP, where the individual has found him/herself abandoned by the party for going against the grain, being a whistleblower or not toeing the party line. Such detractors too have often been called traitors or agency informers.
A newspaper that made its niche on the entire premise of promoting liberal ideals even censored the foreign supplement it carries – for national honour! Contrast and consider the rewards for this patriotic policy of a private, independent, liberal newspaper that uses the same vocabulary of ‘traitor’ against a critic-journalist in order to defend a ‘premier’ state agency.
In this competitive discrediting, the central issue that is being identified as the bone of journalistic-establishment contention is getting lost. Mir’s consistent pursuit of the Baloch missing persons movement remains unaddressed. Some recall that this was the straw that broke the former chief justice’s back when he was unceremoniously removed from office by Gen Musharraf in 2007. However, just as many abandoned the movement for the restoration of the CJ when the PPP struck a deal with Gen Musharraf, so too now, the principle will be brushed away in the name of pragmatism and the motive behind the attempted silencing will be blurred with tempered support for media freedoms but with ‘responsibility’.
Within their own liberal ghetto, the freedom collective does not demand such rigour from their own colleagues. Many will praise the ‘courageous reporting’ by some blogger buddies and private NGO reports authored by friends, without questioning the methods or attribution or indeed, accusations in the findings of their narrow reports. Many such reports identify the ‘agencies’ that their subjects testify against and hold responsible for their plight – in Balochistan, Okara, Fata, Swat etc.
However, these democratic ‘neutrals’ who anguish over the systematic torture and disappearances of the Baloch people, are not endorsing Mir for mainstreaming this critical issue through his hugely populist and public medium.
Conservative journalists selectively demand democratic freedoms but exclude free will, choice and liberty, especially equal freedoms for women or the freedom to worship for minorities. Instead, their definition of freedoms tends to be male-defined, grand philosophies of sovereignty, honour and Muslim dominance.
These media hawks have often abused their own power by merging their identities as reporter/journalist/columnist-cum-holy moral avenging angel to ‘fix’ society. They have used their media channels/newspapers unopposed, by devoting front page and column space simultaneously to call for bans on books, YouTube, NGO reports and vilified those who have called for reforms of discriminatory laws or, been critical of the role of the military and intelligence agencies in the past. How do they expect to get sympathy and support on the principle of freedoms today then?
Meanwhile, the liberals’ retreat and unwillingness to confront and expand the space for civilian supremacy is a shameful case of hiding behind niceties, restraint and obfuscations that is otherwise called self-censorship. Those who wrote about the dirty tricks played by the establishment against the post-Benazir PPP and considered it elitist to expect the common people to accept a non-dynastic and democratised Pakistan in 2008 are not today recalling the importance of resisting the military posturing so as to take politics into a future without military interference.
Where are all those liberal journalists who otherwise cry hoarse about the anti-democratic agencies and their interlocuting role with militants and against separatists in their ‘brave’ journalism?
This is the kind of self-censorship that gets women, who won’t speak out about their domestic abusers, killed. This is the same community that will write ‘subversive’ and mocking self-congratulatory criticism of the military and establishment in private reports, novels, blogs, foreign newspapers, social media and conferences but is unwilling to even take the opportunity to uphold their theoretical objection to military machinations, interference, lack of accountability and adventures in their public stance today.
Between the selective censorship of conservative democrats and the self-censorship of the liberal democrats, the military has won the day – once again – and can even use the mainstream independent media as its mouthpiece.
The writer is a sociologist based in Karachi. Email: afiyazia@yahoo.com