In the ’80s and ’90s, English language newspaper opinion columns carried mainly the dry and staid views of retired bureaucrats. When Musharraf staged his coup in 1999 and conscripted Pakistan into the ‘war on terror’, most analysts refused to challenge his praetorian rule and the few critical ones were not heard.

This had changed by 2004 when some experienced columnists at The News, including the insightful Rahimullah Yousufzai, Kamran Shafi, (the repentant) Ayaz Amir, Ghazi Salahuddin, Masood Hasan, Naseem Zehra and Shafqat Mahmood were joined by a new generation of columnists, enlisted by Talat Aslam and Beena Sarwar. Then on, op-ed writing directly challenged Musharraf’s ‘controlled democracy’ and fake ‘enlightened moderation’ projects.

Shakir Hussein and Khusro Mumtaz wrote humorous social commentary; Farooq Sulehria offered a left-leaning critique; Babar Sattar guided readers on constitutional violations and Tammy Haq and Kamilla Hayat on human rights; Fatima Bhutto’s internecine commentary revealed the darker subculture of Pakistan’s politics and (un)belonging; feminism began to appear in print media as a political subject and lens. More women columnists began to fill the pages of the English dailies. There was plenty of space for apologist columnists, too, and the inclusion of foreign and Pakistani Diaspora writers became an embedded practice.

The editors were old-school journalists – many from the Zia era - with field experience and ethics that would stand out today in contrast with an uncodified social media-dependent journalism. My first column in 2004 was titled, Co-option is No Option (regretting the willingness of politicians, civilians and NGO activists to collaborate with Musharraf). Other titles were, Children of Dictatorship, The Emperor Has No Clothes, The Under Belly of Dictatorship, Men, Money, Military and Mullahs, and ‘Why the Caged Bird Sings. The editors did not censor a phrase, tone down the articles, object to subject matter or self-censor for fear of causing offense to some friend or colleague criticised in the columns. Over the years, while state censorship has stifled freedom externally; internally, the entry of newly minted journo-graduates has led to decline in editorial professionalism and the loss of several critical voices. (Farah Zia, former editor of The News on Sunday, was a noteworthy exception).

Unlike Dawn, The News did not discourage debates among its opinion writers. A provocative S Akbar Zaidi wondered why the army was blamed for repeat interventions while our elites continued to applaud unelected technocrat-supported military regimes (Why Blame the Army? November 26, 2006^t). Then parliamentarian Shafqat Mahmood (today a federal minister) took umbrage and retorted by asking Zaidi, Why Blame the People? (December 1). My lesser comment was, Why Absolve the Markets? (December 5), arguing that free market economies exploited democracies and dictatorships indiscriminately.

Another debate was with Moeen Cheema and Abdur Rahman Mustafa (March 22 and 27, 2014), who offered an accusatory defence to my criticism of the Council of Islamic Ideology’s support of child marriage (March 16, 2014). More recently, along with Salman Akram Raja and Babar Sattar, I disagreed with Feisal Naqvi’s suppositional support of the Federal Shariat Court (January 2016).

For most of these years, there was no internet edition and no social media but a community of columnists across Dawn, Daily Times, The Nation, The Friday Times, and The News, developed a critical mass that peaked in collective dissent through the Lawyer’s Movement (2007-2009). Letters to the editor, readers’ emails and political conversations on PTV and the newly launched private channels demonstrated that the landscape was not all bleak and that pockets of dissent agreed with the informed and sustained critiques of opinion-makers.

Talk-shows; the new chattering class

Post-Musharraf, in 2008, there followed the expansion of political TV talk-shows. Many of the anchors were not journalists. They were self-defined media personalities acting as mid-wives for many oily businessmen with fingers in the political pie who set up studios to amplify their interests.

Many mid-career professionals in the electronic media today are Musharraf’s children who jostled with the foreign press and carved careers during the War on Terror years when Pakistan was in the global spotlight. The upward path of their careers was heavily reliant on social media and socialising with politicians. Women became equal contenders for the competitive and traditionally male-dominated screen space.

This was also the time that saw the populist rise of the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf through performative politics and its use of social media for mass mobilisation. The PTI’s confidence in digital data as predictive of socio-cultural reality apparently duped its leadership into believing that the party had been robbed of electoral victory in 2013 – a gross miscalculation and ultimately a false allegation. The only thing punctured in the process was the credibility of those who defamed the Election Commission. But it alerted all political parties to the potential of virtual spaces for building a political narrative and promoting political iconography.

Major parties started deploying social media to expand their vote banks. Their media cells established their cyber footprint through Facebook, Twitter, digital campaigns, videos and statements but more significantly, to cultivate a narrative and opinions against political rivals. For some reason, the costs for such activities are not accounted as campaign expenses, even by the ECP.

Data mining by Facebook and Pakistan’s own censorious PECA laws has made Pakistan’s political cyberspace a counter-cultural echo-chamber. It only offers subscribers some minimal exposure to alternative information and no stomach for critical opinion. As a key tool to brand and promote political party narrative, social media is also used to crowd out political critique through personalised trolling. Clearly, political leadership endorses this tactic and justifies it with the gentrified term, ‘disruptive technology’.

Social media’s algorithms are designed to appeal to emotions rather than facts and evidence. It’s a miscalculation to think that abuse, unverified accusations, misinformation, fake news, or photo-shopped images are going to be managed by law or codes of conduct, anytime soon. Fuelled by digital technology, a culture of partisan political hatred has become part of Pakistan’s sociology.

5^th Generation hybridity or sum zero?

By the time of the 2018 general election, real politics had replaced virtual expectations. The Establishment did the heavy lifting and brought the PTI on the ‘same page’ and into government. By now, it was convinced that it had catapulted beyond physical, guerilla or even proxy warfare and into a “5^th Generation” stage of combat.

Understood as the battle of perceptions and information, the concept seems to assume responsibility for a cultural and moral defence and to correct any narrative or philosophies that disagree with state-defined religio-nationalism. It refashions the notion of the battlefield, the soldier, the patriot, traitor and intelligence. If the battlefield is the national psyche, then the weapons are iconography and rhetoric. The main weapon of 5^th Gen warfare seems to be the selfie – with patriotic veiled women and fanboy civilians - and videos of tea-drinking captured enemy combatants.

To propagate the 5^th Gen script, traditional mascots have been replaced by celebrity-spokespeople. Proxy war is a term that now applies to Veena Malik’s twitter handle. The media wing of the Armed Forces (ISPR) is no longer limited to funding clumsy films that demonise politicians and ethnic minorities but also sponsors a series of TV dramas beamed into our homes on a regular basis.

Data mining by Facebook and Pakistan’s own censorious PECA laws has made Pakistan’s political cyberspace a counter-cultural echo-chamber. It only offers subscribers some minimal exposure to alternative information and no stomach for critical opinion.

This form of social engineering does not need boring op-ed writers or unpredictable religious leaders. Instead, it recruits pious celebrities and patriot influencers to underwrite the script via Twitter and sponsored junkets. Also interesting is the emergence of social media celebrities who behave as moral interrupters (Qandeel Baloch, Hareem Shah) causing anxiety to social and political conservatives and inviting the interest of the state as potential recruits, albeit, after being redeemed.

While the consumer-citizen is entertained and coaxed into docile or furious nationalism – as the occasion requires – discredited political leaders are expected to deliver miraculous material services with little resources and to struggle for imaginative ways to connect with and appease their constituents.

Fankaars and fandom

Films, sports and the entertainment industry are often considered the antidote to worldly concerns and business and academic matters. Intellectuals pontificate against dichotomies but South Asian fandom for entertainers and celebrities is not found in reason or logic but in emotions, desire and aspirations. This is evident in the emulation of filmi fashion, songs and dances at weddings and social events and in the homosocial imitation of stars.

When Bollywood star, Amitabh Bachchan was injured on the set ofCoolie in 1982, his fans held mass vigils and went on pilgrimages to urge his recovery. In 1990, the anti-Salman Rushdie Pakistani film, International Gorillay was released with actor Afzal Ahmed playing Rushdie’s character. It wasn’t enough that this villain was punished for his sins by (spoiler alert) incinerating laser beams shooting out from flying holy books. The actor would get physically attacked by mobs whenever he was spotted in person off-screen. When South Asian cricket teams lost tournaments, fans would turn into vigilantes and lurk in wait at airports to pelt the players, who were compelled to sneak into the country and hide until the collective anger dispelled. South Asian fans may not stalk fankaars like in the West but can love and hate them with incomparable excess and commitment.

As political populism sweeps across the globe and celebrities and sportsmen get voted to leadership, the appeal of fandom has spread even wider. When Major General Asif Ghafoor took over the helm and handle of the ISPR Twitter feed, he achieved a fan following that competed with politicians and celebrities. As a spokesman, Ghafoor created a symbiotic relation between the ISPR’s official and his own private twitter by self-referential retweeting. He had a wide-range of targets and a penchant for sub-tweeting - from cryptic criticism of “Endia”, to deconstructing dance item numbers in Pakistani films. He referred to detractors or critics as ‘strays’ and prescribed Burnol to treat the burning jealousy of imagined foes. All this gained him thousands of adulating twitter followers whom he regularly blessed like a pope but interestingly, could not prevent irreverent and even abusive trolls off his timeline.

Followers of Imran Khan, Trump and Modi are mocked as youthias, hicks and urine-drinking primitives. Such derision suggests that all these supporters are messiah-worshippers who suffer from mass delusion or uncritical adulation. May be. But our journalists, columnists, opposition politicians, activists, novelists and lawyers are not immune to the drug of hero-worship, either. They too are hyper active on Twitter, hyper visible on TV talk shows and festivals, and they too revel in fandom. Many of them profess uncritical admiration of one another and form exclusive WhatsApp groups with frat-like membership. This allows intellectual alliances to be formed just like the fan followings of populist leaders or celebrities - bonded in unison by their love for the star or intellectual selves, and who incriminate their rivals.

A younger generation of critics who used to object to dynastic political parties or complain about an older civil society, have now developed time lines that make them old enough to become targets of trolling. Previously selective in their defensiveness over criticism of religious politics, naming/shaming call outs, and social media activism, they now find themselves being accused of being lifafa-driven, contradictory, unfair, harshly critical, patwari-sponsored, nepotistic, self-serving and Islamophobic. Even woke online political commentary by scholars and activists often turns on itself and into competitive wars of self-righteous words and bullying and tends to be driven by affiliation, friendship and fandom, rather than on principle or evidence.

Politics not populism

For those who consider politics to be a sober form of governance, the thinning of the line between politics and entertainment is a cause of concern. The Covid-19 pandemic has aggravated people’s fears that while populist leaders may inspire good TV, tabloid gossip, optical stunts and memes, they do not like to seek consensus or work with collective wisdom and are easily distracted.

The merciless pandemic is an opportune moment to re-evaluate the worth of a populism that is high on rhetoric but low on substance. Fandom seems to have drowned out the voices and demands of traditional constituency-based voters for their needs and security, which they find themselves bereft of today.

Volunteering is a very important part of citizenry but it cannot be a replacement for local governance, no matter how many colour-coded t-shirts we dress it up in. Celebrities play a vital role in charity and raising awareness but actual governance requires leadership that transcends glamour. Instead of centralised control, it is the local MPAs and Union Councils with district administrations that must be supported and relied on to deliver basic services in response to the pandemic at constituency levels.

Celebrities are judged for their charisma and talent but leaders will ultimately only be remembered for policy responsiveness, especially in moments of crises. Today, leaders must not be blindsided by fandom but be attuned to their critics and remember that opposition politicians have constituents who are Pakistani citizens too. At this point, all our lives depend not on performance and point-scoring but on cohesive, accurate, consensual, firm decisions and sustained, cooperative, effective and concrete responses.