The Pakistani Spectator

“It would not have been possible to ask the questions we did here,” said my friend who had now moved to Jordan. She had worked on a report recently released by the British Council that took and in-depth look at the younger generation of Pakistanis. It was a detailed and important piece of work that required over a thousand men and women to be interviewed across a range of topics. What my absent friend was referring to was the relative freedoms we enjoy here in Pakistan when compared to some of the countries around us, in particular freedoms of movement, association and the media. We rarely look outwards, make the comparison that would allow us to judge — and are so used to being judged by just about everybody else that our self-perception has perhaps become negatively skewed. This is not to suggest for one moment that all is well in the Land of the Pure because anybody with a functioning set of senses can see that it is not — but it’s not all broken. Indeed, for a country with a portfolio of problems of the magnitude we face, we are, in some ways, in remarkably good shape — and nowhere better at the moment than the media.

Let’s not get embroiled in the ‘quality’ issue because the electronic media will sort itself out eventually; it is a bright young thing and has to sow its wild oats before settling into respectable adulthood. Instead, take a few minutes to stand back and consider where we have got to in terms of mass communication and where we came from, and consider the freedoms that are increasingly embedded within. We may — with justification — grumble and chafe at some of the restrictions that occasionally appear; but the media genie has long left the bottle and the last time the government made a serious attempt to censor it at the time of the state of emergency, it fell flat on its face in days. Our media is freer and more open that that of China, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and most of the Middle Eastern countries, the countries of the Maghrib, virtually all of the old communist-bloc states and several of the countries of South-East Asia.

Our ramshackle political system has always been a mess, it will remain corrupt and inept for an indeterminate time to come and, perversely, will continue to bump along at the bottom and not fall over the edge. The shaky democracy we have is still better than the governance enjoyed — or not — but many other Muslim nations. Our parliament may be weak and our president accidental, but would we rather have the dictatorships disguised as faux royalty that dominate the Arabian peninsular?

We have a nation where enough of the fundamental freedoms survive to allow the British Council to do the work that produced the report, which is a chilling and largely pessimistic look into the crystal ball. It may be an uncomfortable read but its there for anybody to read if they want to. Take a look at the hawker with his newspapers over his arm. Read opinion from left and right and then do the same with the TV channels. Hear/see anything? Free speech is what you are hearing/seeing. It may be far from pretty or honest and true but it has a cranky kind of freedom about it. It is all too easy in Pakistan to get overwhelmed by what is wrong and lose sight of what is right. Let’s be thankful for some of the things we have that are worth having — and work to preserve them for that same reason.