President Pervez Musharraf’s advisors constantly tell him that “Pakistan’s image” abroad is painted bad by the foreign media only because Pakistan’s own homespun media is its country’s worst “enemy”. They say the foreign media picks up the yarn from the Pakistani media and weaves it unflatteringly for the international market. Therefore everything would be hunky dory and rivers of foreign investment would flow into the country, blessing high and low alike, if only the Pakistani media could be persuaded to restrain its criticism of government. For good measure, the “national interest” is also bandied about in such advisories on the dubious assumption that it is equal to the “government’s interest”.
This is a warped view of how the media works. Surely, as one of the famed “pillars of the democratic state”, it is the job of the press to force the state to wash its dirty linen and cleanse itself continuously. Nor is any regime or government the sole repository of the state or indeed the exclusive arbitrator of the “national interest”. Certainly, a non-democratic or unrepresentative government is least qualified to monopolize definitions of the “national interest”. The solution, therefore, is not to gag or lecture the media but to provide credible answers to issues raised by the media. Here are some particularly relevant and timely questions and answers.
President Musharraf wonders why everyone is convinced that the forthcoming elections won’t be free and fair. Surely, he says, his regime has done everything transparently and his own record of sticking to pledges isn’t bad. But that’s not true at all. For starters, it is common knowledge (of mythological proportions) that except for the 1970 elections every election to date has been rigged more or less by incumbents or by the perennial establishment. The record also shows a string of arbitrary and authoritarian decrees, including two farcical referendums (one by General Musharraf himself), and significant intelligence agency involvement in the politics of the country (one major case against the ISI is pending in the Supreme Court). But more specifically, people ask why, if he really wanted free and fair elections, didn’t he appoint an election commission with the approval of the opposition parties, why doesn’t he suspend the local governments that favour his alliance partners, why doesn’t he sanction a neutral national caretaker government to oversee the elections? His personal record is also tainted. He said he would quit as army chief in 2004 but didn’t. He said the elections would be held on January 8 but now it’s February 18. He said he would “never” impose an Emergency but he decreed a mini-martial law and an Emergency last November. He said he’d never chain the media. Yet he has inflicted some of the most suffocating gags on the media and it has taken three months for all the channels to be back on air after signing various humiliating undertakings and even now some anchorpersons are banned.
President Musharraf is also irked that the blame for the wheat and flour crisis is being laid at his door. He says the problem of flour shortage was created because large quantities of Pakistani wheat were smuggled to India, Afghanistan and Central Asia where prices were up to 50% higher, and that profiteers and hoarders reaped the benefits of artificial shortages. That may be true. But whose job is it, if it isn’t that of the government of the day, to stop the smuggling of precious national resources and punish profiteers and hoarders? Surely, we are talking of the smuggling of truckloads of wheat across metal roads through border security checkpoints and not mule-packs of heroin across dry riverbeds and barren mountains. Also, better handling of stocks and exports, coupled with some elementary pre-emptive action by the Shaukat Aziz government, might have staved off this crisis. Instead, President Musharraf has ridden to the defense of Mr Aziz like Don Quixote tilting at the windmills.
President Musharraf is also worried that post-election Pakistan is fated for unstable coalition governments because no party will get an absolute majority in the elections. Why is he so sure of what the voters are going to say? Some pollsters think the PPP will get a majority. And why should tomorrow’s coalition governments be any worse than the ones under President Musharraf’s tutelage yesterday, as in Sindh between the MQM and PMLQ and in Islamabad and Balochistan between the PMLQ and assorted groups and parties? Indeed, most analysts think his fear stems not from the probability of unstable coalition governments but from the fear that a stable ruling coalition between the PPP and PMLN might actually oust him from the presidency.
The fact is that the media was warm towards President Musharraf for many years because he did some good things in the national interest but has lately cooled because of his blundering approach to law, justice, elections, media and democracy. The assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the rise of religious extremism on his watch have also alienated most Pakistanis from him. So they see him as part of the problem rather than the solution. But he perceives himself in quite the opposite light. So who is to blame?