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| PPP media bashing: a personal note |
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Saturday, May 03, 2008
It is so disturbing for me to see the Pakistan People's Party and its "Jiyalas" getting really edgy these days. They go mad if you speak anything that does not sound music to their ears. And if you dare to show them the mirror, you are at risk of being condemned and maligned with a kind of third-rate allegations that are even surprising for you.
I am not sure about others in my profession but this is precisely what I am experiencing these days. My colleague, Rauf Klasra, also has similar complaints. If something strange happens to you once, it should be ignored but if it becomes frequent then it means it is all calculated.
The PPP, which claims to be the champion of democracy and freedom of press, is not prepared to welcome media's criticism for what it is doing these days. It sees a conspiracy behind my critical writings on Asif Ali Zardari's somersaults on judges’ issue and has thus unleashed a campaign to malign me. It has started quite recently but now things have gone to such a limit where the party has sponsored one of its minnow leaders from Karachi to dub me as a "sick mind", the one who issues "edict" and wants anarchy in the country. In his statement published in Jang on Thursday, I was declared as member of Jamaat-e-Islami and former Nazim of Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba – the PPP's "fact" that was never revealed to me before. If I can trust my memory, the only active politics I did in my student life was as President of the People's Student Federation (PSF) unit of the Government College, Asghar Mall, Rawalpindi, in 1985-86. To be very frank, I don't feel proud even for that, rather ashamed for certain slogans we used to chant just to infuriate the Jamaatis. The libelous statement of the PPP minnow was in response to my Wednesday's story on Asif Ali Zardari’s backtracking from his commitment -- Zardari, Musharraf are cast in the same mould. If the party finds my writing wrong, it should formally rebut the story. If it was libelous or defamatory, then the PPP has the right to take me to the court of law. If I have committed a crime, then even the party has the right to lodge a criminal FIR against me and have me arrested. But it does not suit the PPP to resort to third-rate tactics to harass the media persons.
Just a few days back, it was the PPP that used the office of the Press Information Officer to get two letters of unknown Zardari's supporters (if they really do exist) published in The News in defence of the PPP co-chairperson for a story, ‘Zardari exposed, Nawaz walks on tight rope’. In that case, even the PPP instead of coming up with a rebuttal or a legal case, depended on its unknown supporters to defend the party's co-chairperson, that too by using the government's influence.
After the matter was reported by The News, the PML-Q's Senator Mushahid Hussain filed a call attention notice in the Senate Secretariat. The Q-Senator talked to me on Tuesday and informed me that he was going to file the call attention notice on this matter. I thanked him and said that as per our history, it is always the opposition that defends the media while the governments never like the media persons critical of their policies, etc.
To my disappointment, the same evening I received a phone call from a PPP minister, who after shifting the blame on the PIO asked me to get the call attention notice withdrawn from the Senate Secretariat. "What are you talking about?" was my immediate response. I asked the minister that it was Senator Mushahid Hussain, who had moved the call attention notice and not Ansar Abbasi. I told the minister that I was contacted by the Senator and fully supported his initiative. The minister was advised to defend the government's case in the Senate. Towards the end of the last week, a PPP senior leader from Karachi while talking to our colleague Ahmad Noorani said that The News had become biased against the PPP while denying that his party was considering fixing the tenure of the CJ or extending age of the CJ.
The PPP leader, who never spoke to me in life, cynically told my colleague that if Ansar Abbasi would tell him that what was happening in his party or what decisions his party was going to take. The fact though remains that Rehman Malik and Farooq Naek are the only informed persons in the party, it was Asif Ali Zardari's talk in the Meray Mutabiq where he confirmed all that was earlier considered by the party mere as "speculative" stories of this scribe.
The same PPP leader from Karachi angrily said if Ansar Abbasi would tell him what his wife was doing? He told Noorani that you people in media for attaining certain objectives are planting all such things. Recently, a respected senior colleague in Geo told this correspondent that Zardari House too feels that Jang Group is conspiring against the PPP. My colleague – Rauf Klasra – is no exception. These days a campaign has also been unleashed through fake letters to the editors. It's an open secret that the PPP media cell drafts these strong worded letters and is sending to newspapers with fake names and e-mail IDs.
Klasra says that some top leaders of the PPP have been warning him during recent weeks not to write against the PPP co-chairperson. According to Klasra, even some journalists were sent to him with a clear message to behave.
For media persons in Pakistan, such things are not new. The country's media has faced worse days in the past but what is disappointing for me is that the PPP is doing this and that too when the country is getting back to real democracy from the shadow of over eight years military rule.
As far as the media is concerned, the past record of our democrats, whether Bhuttos or Sharifs, has not been really great. It has been our irony that the tolerance level of both the PPP and the PML-N in the past has been generally low. But now we expect from them to be patient and not treat the media as its enemy. Just to remind the PPP, during Benazir Bhutto's second term, her government pressurised the then editor of the newspaper I was working with to issue me a show cause notice for the reason that my writings on bureaucracy were found blocking certain irregular appointments of a blue-eyed officer of Asif Ali Zardari. During Nawaz Sharif's second term, a director of the Intelligence Bureau was sent to the bureau office of the newspaper I was associated with during those days over a story that talked of the then prime minister's misuse of his discretionary fund. Several journalists were wronged during the tenures of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif.
Though Musharraf's tenure like that of General Ziaul Haq has been much worse particularly after March 9, 2007, this is shocking that the PPP has become so aggressive so early against media persons.
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ISSN 1563-9479 
