When it is a matter of controlling the right of newspapers to distribute freely, there is little to choose between a Marxist dispensation and an Army-backed one. The decision of Pakistani authorities to put the brakes on supply of the leading English-language newspaper Dawn by targeting distributors is reminiscent of the methods that the CPI (M)-backed hawkers’ unions once used in West Bengal.
Dawn published an interview of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif ~ a perfectly legitimate journalistic assignment and one that ought to have raised no cavil, even if the content was unpalatable to the country’s military-security establishment.
Mr Sharif was candid enough to say ~ “Militant organisations are active. Call them non-state actors, should we allow them to cross the border and kill 150 people in Mumbai? Explain it to me. Why can’t we complete the trial?” The suggestion that the Pakistani state allowed militant organisations to be “active” was bad enough; to have said the state allowed them to cross the border and kill 150 people in Mumbai was sacrilegious.
To then wrap the judicial system in by asking why Pakistan could not complete the trial was perhaps the last straw. In quite the most fantastic reaction to the interview, the Press Council of Pakistan, not particularly well known for a having upheld Press freedoms in the country, notified the editor of Dawn that his paper had breached the code of journalistic ethics by publishing content that “may bring into contempt Pakistan or its people or tends to undermine its sovereignty or integrity as an independent country”.
Of course, as responses of this nature often do, the Council blithely ignored the fact that such contempt that Pakistan or its people may have invited was by committing the original sin ~ of having harboured militant organisations that attacked and killed citizens of a neighbouring state.
The global watchdog, Reporters Without Borders, has condemned the action of the authorities in unequivocal terms. In a statement, it said: “The unwarranted blocking of the distribution of one of the main independent newspapers has yet again shown that the military are determined to maintain their grip on access to news and information in Pakistan. It is clear that the military high command does not want to allow a democratic debate in the months preceding a general election. We call on the authorities to stop interfering in the dissemination of independent media and to restore distribution of Dawn throughout Pakistan.”
The irony of the action against the newspaper can’t be lost on Pakistanis. The country is ruled ~ on paper ~ by a Prime Minister belonging to the party named after Mr Sharif.
And yet, across a broad swathe of the country, a newspaper that carried an interview of the ruling party’s, by no means estranged, founder gets to be proscribed by those who yield more power than the elected government or the party that runs it. Hail democracy!