PukhtunWomen

The Long and Short of the Arm of Law

I think I speak for most of us if I write that there are times when we allow our mind to play tricks on us. Call it an elaborate self-hoax if you would, but it is just so one can feel a wee bit better about a very bad situation. For instance I indulge in a ruse of my own some days of the week while getting to work. If I have the misfortune to get a seat where I know I will be facing in a direction opposite to in which the train is traveling I fool my mind into thinking something else. I have become quite skilled at discovering a particular angle in which I can just watch the reflection of passing by sights in the window, so to trick myself into thinking that I am traveling towards the city—where clearly I am on the outward-bound train. I might humor myself about this ‘fake’ journey, moving forwards when everything is going backwards for ten minutes of my five-day work week, however Messrs. Musharraf and his coterie have been on that train all past month, if not longer.

And their recent action of, so we heard on the weekend, arm wrestling the management of the Geo television network (through the offices of the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority-PEMRA) into pulling the plug on Kamran Khan’s programme is just one act of deception, that frankly wont fool anyone. On the night of March 15th, the Geo News channel aired an apology to its viewers, explaining how audiences will not be watching the said program for some time. This as their government just doesn’t like it when someone screens video and audio clips that embarrass members of the cabinet. Well perhaps not exactly in the same words, but you get my drift. I have as yet not received any word whether said minions of the government machinery have managed to block our access to internet sites that host said clips in question—but that could have changed by the time this column goes into print. I still cannot fathom what thinking (or lack of thinking) goes into implementing such policies. For a demographic group that has grown up believing Allah watches everything, I really cant figure out why any minister would think that if no one can watch them making fools of themselves, it didn’t happen!!!

And it is just not with the advent of the internet, or satellite television that we started catching our esteemed members of parliament and government ministers indulging in colorful language or as they say ‘unparliamentary language’. Before a time when a certain Mr. Nawaz Sharif started speaking in honeyed terms regarding Madam Bhutto (following their weird political marriage), there was an incident when a certain Chief Minister indulged (yes that is my word of the week, INDULGE) in some pretty unparliamentary language regarding his Prime Minister in a jalsa (public meeting). Nawaz Sharif’s ‘outspokenness’, to be termed the least, did manage to be preserved for posterity through a video recording of the rally. I think that was my first exposure to ‘candid camera journalism’, everyone just ‘had’ to watch that infamous tape. That I couldn’t follow the Punjabi and was at an age where I would rather watch someone tall and American on my TV screen rather than three hours of a stout Sharif, kind of dampened my spirits and I didn’t get to the said offending portion—but suffice to say we knew it was out there in the public domain. A certain Army Chief had his encounter with a dictaphone in the early nineties (which was followed by teachers in Quaid-e- Azam University forbidding students from taping their lectures just in case their political musing was used against them). To summarize, not that I am saying youtube in recent months and Shalimar Video earlier are and were doing God’s work, but Mr Wasi Zafar, please bear in mind, where there is light, there is God, and a citizen journalist committing it to digital memory.

And considering that our government now wants an endorsement from religious circles for every action —for instance baton wielding seminary students guide Musharraf and CDA on urban planning in the national capital, I know as a fact that the Internet is good for spreading the word of God, it has been very good for Muslim intellectuals. Jon Anderson tells us how through the internet, ‘Islam’s new interpreters’ have been able to create world wide networks that significantly “extend conversations, expressions, and representations of and about Islam that were previously confined to coffee houses, university dormitories, cells, peer circles, and other off-hours sites of discussion and debate. The Internet unites such people, not just electronically but also through shared intellectual techniques derived from higher education, including techniques other than those classically associated with religious discussion and exegesis that are organized by and delivered in madrasa and other ‘traditional’ forms” (for more on this read Jon W Anderson in Dale F Eickelman and Jon W Anderson ed. New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere, published by the Indiana University Press). So please don’t pull the plug on our internet dear government of mine if you want us to be good Muslims. And if you are in a good mood let the deposed Chief Justice and his family get back their broadband access, for they want to be good Muslims too.

Now revisiting Messr Mussharaf and co. We all know of the synergy that transpires between Washington and Islamabad. However I do believe that the good general has taken the catch phrase ‘serving with the pleasure of the president’ that has been circulating the corridors of Washington quite close to his heart. How else would you explain why he bulldozes any whiff of opposition that appears in our national capital? The catchphrase ‘serving’ or is it ‘servicing the pleasure of the president’ (it has appeared very liberally in press conferences given by the powers that are in Washington—be it the Attorney General, Vice President, Secretary of State, Defence Secretary, Chief of Staff) has been given very rude connotations by the leading wits in United States. So before we see a similar synergy between their counterparts amongst Islamabad commentators, and well aspersions on someone’s preferences, I would ask the good general to please desist from his recent polices.

Now I have to conclude on a nugget of information from across the border that I came across on the BBC South Asia website. I really don’t know for sure whether the BBC correspondent who filed the story was trying to make a sly dig over the controversy that the use of the term ‘long arm of the law’ has caused in Pakistan or not. What else can I conclude if I am to read the headline ‘why the long armpit of the law in India could smell a little sweeter’!!

But well for all those who are interested please read on.

“Police in India's western state of Gujarat are to try out new fragrant, light-weight uniforms to see if they make them less sweaty and smelly. The uniforms will be doused with the smell of flowers and citrus to help police improve their image by being less malodorous in the heat of summer. Designers say that they hope the new uniforms will also be more comfortable. They say they will contain more "ventilation outlets" so that sweat has a greater chance of evaporating.”

We in Pakistan just want someone to take a good look at the arm of the law (sweet smelling or not) in our country. Definitely out of journalist houses and well a bit stronger when it comes to the integrity of the Supreme Court.