Media and its discontents

PRAISES have been heaped on the media and at the same time abuses have been hurled at it for its coverage of events that have unfolded in the recent past. The media coverage of the lawyers’ movement has especially been a bone of contention between the lawyers and the Musharraf camp.

The latter condemned the media vehemently as though the entire judicial crisis was its creation. The lawyers eulogised the media projection so profusely that it led one to believe that the movement would fail without the blessings of the media.

But on taking a closer look at the matter one finds that the criterion underlying this qualified denunciation and appreciation of the media has been the degree to which it has served the interests of one side or the other. This approach to news coverage has swept under the carpet the real problems that are plaguing the print and electronic media.

Some of the basic issues that are being questioned are the graphic depiction of the gory details in the aftermath of a suicide bombing, lopsided time and space allocation to a particular story, monopolisation of the national debate on key issues by a few intellectuals and the lack of investigative reporting. In this context, the performance of the media as the fourth pillar of the state has come under intense scrutiny.

There is a strong case for media self-censorship insofar as the depiction of suicide bombing scenes on television is concerned. The objective of the masterminds of suicide bombings is not limited to killing people. They also want to instil terror in the heart of the government and the people. The media has unwittingly been playing into the hands of these terrorists by showing terrifying images on television and spreading panic and despair.

Furthermore, death is a private affair and news channels violate the right to privacy when they display horrible images of the dead or dying. Let alone children, some of the images are too horrific to be handled by adults. Interestingly, one news channel has started employing ‘bombing’ vocabulary in its reporting of price hikes in different items that we have witnessed recently.

“Another bomb falls on the poor: prices of petrol raised by Rs5”. Or “After price hike in petrol, people become victims of yet another bomb: prices of gas also raised”. A couple of points need to be made here with regard to this kind of reporting. One, with the media employing such extreme language, how would the horrifying scenes of suicide bombings impact on the common people in their daily lives? Second, it is easier to sensationalise an issue than to look deep into the structural issues through investigative reporting.

Take for example the issue of a petrol price hike. It is easier to equate it with the falling of a bomb than to investigate how the hike in international crude oil prices by one dollar per barrel translates into the price of one litre of petrol at petrol stations. What is the share of the marketing companies? What is the share of the government in the shape of the taxes that it collects on petrol?

The investigation of these and other problems requires time and resources which most media houses are not willing to provide journalists with. In such a scenario, it is not surprising that the majority of journalists are unfamiliar with the existence of the Freedom of Information Ordinance 2002. Not surprisingly, they are unaware of how to submit information requests to the federal ministries and provincial departments under this law in order to gain access to public documents for investigative reporting.

Related to this is the issue of time and space allocation to particular stories by both the electronic and print media. Reporters and anchor persons give most time and space to stories pertaining to political developments than to reporting and discussing systemic issues of governance. Instead of analysing governance-related structural issues, our anchor persons find it easier to wax eloquent about political developments by inviting politicians from different political parties for discussion.

Take the example of the various news channels that love to invite the information minister to share her thoughts on the emerging political scenario. However, they have never invited Ms Sherry Rehman to discuss the draft of the Freedom of Information Bill 2008 that her ministry recently prepared. For this to happen and for a qualitative discussion on the subject, it would require an extensive study of the existing legislation on the issue and of internationally accepted principles of freedom of information. It would also require a comparative study of different laws enacted by other countries.

Ironically, the media has largely ignored an information law that aims to promote transparent and accountable government by giving citizens access to public documents — a goal that elevates the media to the level of the fourth pillar of the state.

Lastly, news channels have restricted themselves to a handful of intellectuals who keep going from one channel to the other. We are not an intellectually bankrupt nation. There are so many academicians, civil society activists and other individuals who might not be otherwise educated in the conventional sense but are wise enough to give fresh perspectives on national as well as international issues.

The media stands indicted on all the issues raised above. The readers of newspapers and viewers of television are also consumers. As things stand, they have been left to the mercy of market forces as the media gives primacy to selling time and space at the expense of quality of coverage. Protecting corporate interests and establishing and maintaining high standards of quality reporting, both in the print and electronic media, are not mutually exclusive. The issue is that of striking a balance.

The question as to how this balance can be achieved needs to be looked into by the media managers themselves. Civil society organisations working in the area of consumer rights need to intervene and determine how they can mobilise people in order to exert pressure on the media managers to strike this balance.

The president’s roadmap

IT’S Asif’s transition now. While the compact with Nawaz lasted it was hard to sort out which ideas belonged to whom and who wanted what in the transition to democracy.

But with Nawaz gone there’s no doubt about who is conducting the choir now — and he will own whatever it produces, discordant or otherwise.

The separation from Nawaz is itself the first clue of Asif’s roadmap. Nawaz has enunciated a very clear strategy to effect the transition to democracy: reform first; consolidation later. Musharraf out, CJ Iftikhar in, the Seventeenth Amendment repealed and a non-politician president elected is Nawaz’s answer to the riddle of democracy.

Asif has chosen the reverse: consolidation first; reform later. So far Asif’s transition strategy has been to negotiate with the establishment and incrementally consolidate his power. The ascension to the presidency, planned or not, is one of the final steps in the programme to plant democracy’s — in Asif’s case, the PPP’s — flag in the key constitutional offices of the state. When Kayani’s term expires in two years, an unamended constitution will give Asif the right to put his man in the COAS seat. What will be left is the progressive installation of Asif’s handpicked judges to the superior judiciary — with the nod of his governor buddies and chief justices.

Cynics will argue — with some merit — that the difference between Asif’s and Nawaz’s strategy is about 30 seats in parliament. If the majority shoe was on Nawaz’s foot he would have acted differently. At least three facts support this argument: Nawaz ditched the APDM to fight the elections; Shahbaz is coexisting in Punjab with the Lahore High Court and the Punjab governor, remnants of the ancien régime that Nawaz loathes; and the N-League ministers took an oath from Musharraf.

But while political expediency may have pushed Asif and Nawaz into opposing camps, it doesn’t mean what is expedient for the majority party is what is best for the transition. The Nawaz route has some merit. There is only a small window of opportunity for deep, structural change to be effected and that window may have already passed. Seventeen amendments in a 35-year old constitution can be misleading; amendments are notoriously difficult to pull off without a decisive single-party majority in parliament. The decade of democracy is proof enough of how mightily a minority government struggles to achieve constitutional change, even if it’s in the collective interest of all politicians.

Besides, the constitution is not so easily shoved aside, four dictators and five sacked prime ministers notwithstanding. When Musharraf took over, despite the abject state of politics he did not have a carte blanche. The canny Sharifuddin Pirzada knew this, so he put up Musharraf as chief executive rather than chief martial law administrator. Now, with an unrestrained media always on the lookout for a new villain, the next self-appointed saviour will have an even smaller space in which to operate. The next time around it will not be only the gate of the PTV headquarters that will have to be scaled but of dozens of media outlets. So if the constitution had been cleaned up first, the spruced up, more democratic version would have had many fierce defenders were it to come under attack again.

Meanwhile, Asif’s strategy of consolidating power, while certainly easier than ramming through structural reform at the outset, is not without its pitfalls. Trying to draw anti-democratic forces into a tight embrace before slipping a knife quietly in their backs is difficult when they know the knife is coming. The establishment is genuinely paranoid about the PPP — Musharraf made an extraordinarily frank admission about the army high command’s dislike of it — so it puts in doubt how real the consolidation of power through the accumulation of offices can be.

Then there is the fact that Asif is uniquely unqualified for the job. Forget the dementia and corruption — that’s red meat for the media. Foreign policy is Asif’s Achilles heel. The obituary of BB’s first term is littered with references to no-confidence votes, Changa Manga, unrest in Sindh and non-legislation. Two other notable events coincided with BB’s ouster though: the first Gulf war and sabre-rattling with an India angered by the militancy in Kashmir. In those fraught times a babe in a scarf was judged the wrong symbol of Pakistani power, especially with the Beg-GIK combine at hand. Today, a grinning Asif may suffer the same fate as his wife once did.

Kashmir is on a knife-edge again; genuine grassroots dissatisfaction with New Delhi has even led the nationalistic Indian media to debate azaadi for Kashmir. The militants will be straining at the leash and some myopic handler may think it’s a good idea to distract them from the pursuit of the Americans in Afghanistan. India has been snapping about cross-LoC violations for months and every scraped knee it suffers in Afghanistan is blamed on the ISI. One Mayankote Kelath Narayanan has called for the agency’s destruction. Typical Indian hyperbole you may think — but Mr Narayanan happens to be the national security advisor to the prime minister of India.

Then there is the obvious mess in the tribal areas and the fury of the Americans, Brits, Australians, French, Canadians — the list is endless. That’s a pretty important group of people for Pakistan to be on the wrong side of. And, if that wasn’t enough, the Bushies appear determined to go after Iran — and it’s not clear that Obama or McCain won’t if the Bushies don’t. What qualifies Asif to steer the country through these crises? Unless you count being married to BB — nothing, zilch, nada. So Asif’s consolidation may be all for naught if these forces keep closing in.

There is an additional problem with the consolidation strategy: where does it stop? Already talk is centred on Punjab and a putsch led by the Taseer-Wattoo combine there against Shahbaz. The vicious, eat-or-be-eaten-first logic of consolidation is actually its own undoing. The Musharraf-ouster proved mercifully short because Musharraf blinked first. Going to the mattresses over Punjab — that is, an all-out war — will plunge the centre in crisis again and half of Asif’s successor’s speech on PTV will have written itself.

No doubt Nawaz must behave himself in Punjab. But Asif must accept that the bigger you are the bigger will be the target on your back. When — if — the time comes, Asif must turn the other cheek, not as an act of selflessness but as a calculated act of selfishness. If Asif wants to build a PPP empire, he can’t be consumed by fire fighting. An escalating game of political whack-a-mole — always reacting, always behind, never leading — eventually consumes the player.

cyril.a@gmail.com

Arundhati Roy and the K-word

NATIONS are usually proud of their celebrities. But sometimes these celebrities can be a pain in the neck, if they are a little too outspoken, especially at an awkward time.

Arundhati Roy, the petite Booker Prize winner (author of The God of Small Things) has been exactly that, at least to some Indians. She has uttered the dreaded K-word, just when Kashmir has been aflame.

“After 18 years of administering a military occupation, the Indian government’s worst nightmare has come true,” she writes in a cover story for Outlook, one of India’s most read and respected news magazines. “For all these years, the Indian State has done everything it can to subvert, suppress, represent, misrepresent, discredit, interpret, intimidate, purchase — and simply snuff out the voice of the Kashmiri people. It has used money (lots of it), violence (lots of it), disinformation, propaganda, torture, elaborate networks of collaborators and informers, terror, imprisonment, blackmail and rigged elections to subdue what democrats would call ‘the will of the people’.” Strong stuff. Also a tribute to the extent of press freedom in India. Not many developing countries, even those with a free media, would allow such sentiments to be expressed on a sensitive subject. Roy continues, “It was always clear that in their darkest moments, it was not peace that (the people of Kashmir) yearned for, but freedom too,” and then concludes in words of great eloquence that will resonate for a long time to come: “At the heart of it all is a moral question. Does any government have the right to take away people’s liberty with military force? India needs azaadi from Kashmir just as much — if not more — than Kashmir needs azaadi from India.”

Basically, Roy was elaborating on the idea of India as formulated by the nation’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru: a democratic federal republic where all have the right to dissent. Her implication was that this idea of India should be big enough to also take in the right of people to peacefully disassociate themselves from the republic.

The Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) immediately condemned her, virtually calling her words treasonable. The Congress said nothing, though a former Congress prime minister had once said that everything on the status of Kashmir was negotiable, except ‘azaadi’.

Roy’s writing must be viewed in the context of an unprecedented three-month-long mass agitation in Kashmir — which continues at the time of writing — that has taken several lives. At core of the demonstrations is a relatively minor issue, the handing over of some land at the Hindu pilgrimage centre of Amarnath. Yet, the unrest has spread from the Muslim-dominant Valley of Kashmir to the Hindu-majority Jammu region.

Underlying it, however, is something much bigger, the alienation of the Muslims of Kashmir, where a secessionist movement has been going on for almost two decades and which has taken the lives of some 30,000 militants, military personnel and civilians.

Human rights abuses have certainly taken place — on both sides. And Pakistan, despite its official denials, undoubtedly helped to arm and train the militants, at least until a few years ago. Whether this was done by the shadowy intelligence agencies acting on their own, is neither here nor there. Sept 11 and American pressure on Gen Musharraf changed all that.

Be that as it may, the reality is that pro-Pakistani slogans have now been raised in the Valley and the Pakistan flag flown, in defiance of the Indian army, not by the militants, but the general populace. Make no mistake, this is a mass upsurge. That disturbs most Indians. You can use the gun against terrorists but what do you do when virtually all sections of society are demonstrating peacefully?

Though Kashmiris were never really ‘pro-Indian’, even in the days of the charismatic Sheikh Abdullah, they were not ‘pro-Pakistan’ either. Islamabad learnt this to its cost in the 1965 and 1971 wars, when it expected Kashmiris to rise up in revolt. They didn’t.

In any case, it was a paradox for Pakistan to say that there should be a plebiscite in Kashmir, as had been promised by Nehru, and that Kashmiris should have the right to self-determination when that very right was denied to Pakistanis under military rule. But Pakistan now has a democratically elected government. So, the picture has changed.

When Pakistan broke up and Bangladesh was formed, one thing had stuck in this writer’s mind. In the 1960s there had also been a secessionist movement in what is now the state of Tamil Nadu. In fact, the Tamil secessionist demands were more extreme than those made by Sheikh Mujibur Rehman. But in India, the secessionists were voted to power and became moderates. In Pakistan, there was a crackdown on Sheikh Mujib and his party. And we know what followed.

Some people also liken what is happening in Kashmir to what happened with the Sikhs in Punjab. However, that is a false analogy. In Punjab in the 1980s, when Sikh militancy was at its height — and this writer was based there then — the vast majority of Sikhs, though alienated and unhappy over the army assault on the Golden Temple and the anti-Sikh riots that followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi, were by no means votaries of an independent ‘Khalistan’. At most, perhaps 10 to 15 per cent were ‘Khalistanis’. In the Kashmir Valley, on the other hand, the people overwhelmingly want azaadi, so fed up are they with army repression.

Nevertheless, how far can one expect any Indian government to go in meeting Kashmiri demands — and listening to Arundhati Roy’s plea? Sadly, not very far. Although Kashmir is a case apart, given the controversy that shrouded its political status when the British withdrew from the subcontinent, the government in New Delhi has over the years whittled down its special status and treats it like any other part of the country.

So, Ms Roy, though many of us admire your boldness and the sentiments underlying your eloquence, the reality is that no Indian government would risk its political future by making Kashmir azaad. That government would fall. What it can do — and what it must do — is to restore to Kashmiris their lost dignity and their sense of well-being. The call for azaadi will then melt away. Ask the Tamilians.

The writer is a former editor of the Reader’s Digest and Indian Express.

singh.84@hotmail.com

The goose and the gander

THREE weeks ago, when the Georgian army foolishly invaded South Ossetia and the Russian army drove it back out, I wrote that we shouldn’t worry about a new Cold War. An old journalist friend in Moscow immediately e-mailed me saying that I was wrong, and I’m beginning to think he was right. The preparations for a new Cold War, or at least a Very Cool War, are coming along quite nicely.

On August 27, Britain’s foreign minister, David Miliband, flew into Kiev to say that “the Georgia crisis has provided a rude awakening. The sight of Russian tanks in a neighbouring country on the 40th anniversary of the crushing of the Prague Spring has shown that the temptations of power politics remain.”

By recognising the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Miliband said, Russia has ended “the post-Cold War period of growing geopolitical calm in and around Europe.” So Ukraine and Georgia, formerly parts of the Soviet Union, would be welcome to join Nato, formerly Russia’s great enemy. Oh, and one other thing. Russia bore “a great responsibility “ not to start a new Cold War.

On the same day Mitt Romney, a leading candidate for the Republican vice-presidential nomination, was in Denver to make the point that Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential candidate, lacked the judgement and the experience to deal with a crisis like the “invasion of Georgia.” He then proceeded to speculate that the next move of “the Soviets” might be to invade Poland. Well, why not? If we’re going to have the Cold War back, we might as well have the Soviet Union back too.

And so to Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir Putin, who raised the stakes on the following day by speculating that the United States government had encouraged Georgia to attack South Ossetia in order to provoke a crisis. “The American side in effect armed and trained the Georgian army....The suspicion arises that someone in the United States especially created this conflict with the aim of making the situation more tense and creating a competitive advantage for one of the candidates fighting for the post of US president.”

But I don’t believe that the White House told Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili to go ahead and grab South Ossetia, counting on the Russians to counter-attack, smash the Georgian army, and scare Americans into voting for John McCain. The Bush administration would not have betrayed its favourite Georgian so callously. The truth is probably that Saakashvili, having been promised Nato membership, attacked South Ossetia on the false assumption that the United States would threaten war with Russia to back his play.

Now Russia has enraged the West further by recognising the independence of South Ossetia and Georgia’s other breakaway territory, Abkhazia. This is no real loss for Georgia, which has never controlled them since it got its own independence when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991. The local ethnic groups fought off the first Georgian attempts to conquer them in 1991-92, and the “ethnic cleansing” by both sides in those wars ensured that the Ossetian and Abkhaz minorities would never again accept Georgian rule.

Yet for the past sixteen years Moscow did not recognise their independence. Russia has always insisted on preserving the territorial integrity of states, because so many of its own minorities might be tempted by separatism if it were legal for unhappy ethnic groups to just leave a country. If South Ossetia can secede from Georgia, why can’t North Ossetia secede from Russia?

When the major western countries, having occupied Serbia’s Albanian-majority province of Kosovo in 1999 to stop the atrocities being committed there by the Serbian army, finally recognised Kosovo’s independence last February, Moscow was furious. This was a precedent that could unleash international chaos. Well, now it has accepted that same precedent for South Ossetia and Abkhazia — although Hell will freeze over before it agrees that the same principle might apply to, say Chechnya.

As the former British ambassador to Yugoslavia, Sir Ivor Roberts, said last week, Moscow has acted brutally in Georgia. But when the United States and Britain backed the independence of Kosovo without UN approval, they paved the way for Russia’s defence of South Ossetia, and for the current western humiliation. “What is sauce for the Kosovo goose is sauce for the South Ossetian gander.”

There is still no good reason to have a new Cold War, and I still think it won’t happen. But as the politicians posture and the stupidities accumulate, I’m less sure than I was that it won’t happen.

— Copyright Gwynne Dyer