Before the sedition episode is consigned to the archives, let us pause and think. One of the assumptions doing the rounds is that the government’s sudden backtracking is a vindication of the freedom of the press, the result of the justness of the cause. This is wishful thinking.
The history of government-press relations in Pakistan is littered with just causes; rarely, if ever, have they provided cause for celebration. Zamir Niazi has earned a reputation painstakingly and painfully compiling books about the flouting of these just causes and his labours aren’t done yet. Even so, an Amn editor is unceremoniously picked up and grilled in a police station and reporters in Sanghar are arrested and tortured for recording the rigging of a by-election. And yet the injustice of these causes finds few campaigners, leads to no victories.
Have times suddenly changed since? No. It is simply that the circumstances of the present case happened to be different. Consider this: had it been a lesser paper than The News, or had the owner-chief-editor himself not been dragged in, would the campaign have been launched and built up as lustily as it was? Would the APNS-CPNE have been persuaded to respond as solidly as, at least in outward appearance, they did? And would the opposition, the lawyers, the human rights activists and others have rallied as readily? What if, say, reporter Saeed Ahmad alone had been charged?
These are not wholly hypothetical questions. Answers abound in a mass of precedents. Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain may thus be right, for the wrong reason, in snubbing the press for crowing over its victory — except if that victory is now used to light up the path for the future. If, in other words, newspapers and press organisations, recognising the real factor in the present outcome, decide to act firmly and in unison whenever and at whatever level the authorities again overstep the limits. Now that would be something to rejoice over.
The government oversteps the limits not just when it brings a formal charge of sedition against an editor, which in fact has the seeming merit about it of a certain openness and a veneer of recourse to the legal process for a stated offence. It also does that when it sends goons to sort out lesser editors, or frames them on trumped-up charges, or subjects reporters in remoter towns, an Ishaq Tunio, Shafi Bejoro or Shabbir Bhutto, to the third degree.
The press has tended to be divided against itself by its professional and political rivalries, and some employers have been willing to offer the head of a smaller employee in order to assuage, rather than challenge, the wrath of the mighty. Until that changes little else will. We have to understand that whenever the bell tolls it tolls for all; any diminution of the freedom of one diminishes some part of the freedom of the other.
It is spurious also exult in that the government has come out of the sedition episode with egg all over its face. That again may only be half true in the long run. Had it not been that the poem the government objected to seemed a cry from the heart of a genuinely aggrieved mass of common people, graphically symbolised by the aging poet himself, the government might even have won some popular understanding for itself. It might then have appeared to have been defeated by the combined might of a truculently self-regarding press on the one occasion that it had resorted to the seemingly legal process. People are not easily convinced that the press deserves a lot very different from their own.
It is important that the press ponders this aspect too. After everything that needs to be said has ben said about the colonial character of the sedition law, about its irrelevance in the present case, and about the special courts not fulfilling the requirements of due process, questions still remain.
And these are to do with the Press establishing in the public eye its moral right not to be interfered with, its not having to tender nervous apologies, and its creating its own credible channels of redressing complaints against itself. This requires the Press to evolve known and acknowledged norms for itself and to develop an auspices of high probity along the lines of an oft-talked-about press council. In order to be legitimate, the drive for these will have to be voluntary and it will have to come entirely from within the profession.
The freedom of the Press will remain an uncertain commodity so long as in practice it exists by sufferance. And so long as any resistance to an assault on it is an exception rather than the rule, born of a fortuitous combination of circumstances. Last week’s public reaction to the sedition charge against The News has to become a standard, dependable response to all kinds of interference with the Press. That is far from certain yet. It will take a lot more than high rhetoric and individual resolve to become a reality. Rejoicing, at the moment, is premature.