The trial ended in a few minutes: Four lashes would fall on the body of Khawar Naeem Hashmi, accused of defacing the mausoleum of Mohammad Ali Jinnah on Pakistan’s independence day in 1977. He was, arguably, lucky — the other journalists who had joined him in a public protest against military dictatorship were sentenced to five lashes each. Lines were drawn on their backs to ensure the whip would fall with precision; army officers, Hashmi later recalled, would amuse their families by bringing them along to watch.
Lashings seemed to have become popular amusements in General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s time. A hundred thousand people gathered in a Karachi park to watch the punishment of Mohammed Kaleem, convicted of raping a child.
Earlier this week, newspaper owners and editors were called into meetings with Pakistan’s military brass and ordered to cease covering establishment darling-turned-insurrectionary Imran Khan. During his own term as Prime Minister, Imran and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate used enforced disappearances, torture, and false criminal cases to terrorise journalists, even driving some dissidents into exile.
Absar Alam was shot outside his house, expert Lynn O’Donnell records. Asad Ali Toor was bound, gagged, and beaten inside his own home. Exiled critics even found themselves targeted for assassination overseas by hit squads alleged to have been hired by the ISI.
This time around, Imran has been made to wear the muzzle and chain he gleefully used on his opponents—and that’s bad news for Pakistan.
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Building the propaganda factory
Like much of the Indian media, the news industry of Pakistan was born in the ideological crucible of the freedom movement. Dawn, founded by Pakistan movement patriarch Mohammad Ali Jinnah, was converted from a weekly to a daily newspaper. Mir Khalil-ur-Rehman’s Jang, Hamid Nizami’s Nawa-i-Waqt, and Mian Iftikharuddin’s Pakistan Times would drive the emergence of a new generation of post-independence media conglomerates.
Even though an organised media flowered, historians Saima Parveen and Muhammad Nawaz Bhatti remind us, it was not “free to defend the democratic values; instead they were working to praise government policies”. ‘National interests’, ‘the glory of Islam’, and ‘the Ideology of Pakistan’ were catchphrases used to extend support from the press for the government.
General Ayub Khan’s military regime institutionalised this informal censorship. The Left-leaning Pakistan Times, Imroz, and Lail-o-Nahar were nationalised. The three mass-circulation newspapers run by former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s family — Musawat, Hilal-i-Pakistan, and Nusrat — also ended up in the hands of the State-owned National Press Trust.
The Press and Publication Ordinance — introduced by General Ayub and which, among other things, penalised the publication of “crimes of violence or sex in a manner likely to excite unhealthy curiosity” as well as “information calculated to cause public alarm, frustration or despondency”—provided a powerful tool where gentler persuasion failed.
Future historians might debate just how significant censorship was as a tool of regime survival. The law, notably, could not stop Dhaka newspapers from publishing special supplements on 23 March 1971, the anniversary of the Muslim League’s Pakistan resolution as “Emancipation of Bangladesh Day”.
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The democrat’s undemocratic press
Following his installation as President after the 1971 Bangladesh war, media expert JM Williams noted, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto started using more subtle kinds of coercion. The supply of newsprint was a State monopoly, and major advertisers like Pakistan International Airlines were also public-sector entities. The new President had promised to dissolve the National Press Trust earlier but rapidly concluded that the tyrant’s tool could serve its ends too.
The government moved to cancel the newsprint quotas of Jang, stopped advertising for Dawn, and banned The Sun.
General Zia, who seized power in 1977, tightened State control over the media. Even journalists were jailed. Four more — Masudullah Khan, Iqbal Jafri, Khawar Naeem Hashmi, and Nisar Zaidi — were flogged for organising a pro-democracy hunger strike. As during Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, pre-censorship of content was introduced in Pakistan.
Even though Zia’s regime modelled itself on the revolutionary Islamism of Iranian mullahs and the monarchical concentration of power of Saudi Arabia, those regimes managed to use their resources to address at least some of their economic and social problems. The same cannot be said of the Islamism of Zia, Ibrahim Karawan has noted.
Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto did initiate an opening-up of media freedoms in the democratic revival that followed, but editor Imran Aslam recorded that her government routinely sought to buy off critical journalists. The military, for its part, maintained its own list of client writers as it battled the Prime Minister for control.
The Nawaz Sharif government restored the use of blunt tools. The owner of The News, Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman, famously released taped conversations of two prominent government officials seeking to blackmail him into sacking critical journalists by threatening tax prosecutions.
Former military ruler General Pervez Musharraf cast himself as a defender of the free press and enabled the rise of private television news broadcasting. Even under Musharraf, though, journalists who crossed the establishment faced severe consequences. The journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad was murdered, allegedly by military agents.
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Lessons for India
To Indians familiar with their own media history, much of this story will be depressingly familiar. Like in Pakistan, a powerful illiberal impulse ran through Indian democratic institutions after Independence. Enraged by what he claimed was a partisan and communal media, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru cracked down on press freedoms. “Terrible, something terrible,” he said of Indian journalism to the visiting scholar Michael Brecher. “We put an end to it.”
In 1950, the Supreme Court shot down the Government of Madras’ ban on the Left-wing weekly Crossroads. Then, the court stopped the Delhi government from pre-censoring the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS) magazine Organiser. The government responded by resurrecting colonial-era anti-free speech laws.
The Indian State also created a system of pelf and patronage to ensure it controlled the media. Even though the media sometimes fought back, it has rarely enjoyed genuine independence from the government.
Even though few of Imran’s opponents have reason to shed tears for his fate, liberals fear what’s passed for a democratic transition is coming to closely resemble military tyranny. The commentator Omar Warraich, among others, has thoughtfully noted that the real lesson is that the Generals need to be evicted from Pakistani politics. The chokehold of the military on ideas and debate has created a republic of fear.
For Indians, the crisis in Pakistan ought to be a reminder of just how fragile democratic freedoms are—and how difficult they can be to resurrect when they have been allowed to crumble.
The author is National Security Editor, ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)