Roundtable
Issues of Access

– Siddharth Varadarajan

The reciprocal availability of respective media in India and Pakistan has two dimensions. One is the access Indians and Pakistanis have to each other’s media and the other is the access each media has to the other country. There are problems on both counts. As regards the first issue, the main problem is access to print, TV and Internet is limited for legal, technological and political reasons. Apart from film magazines, there is no serious readership for Indian print publications in Pakistan at the mass level. Officials and journalists access magazines and dailies on the Internet. Here there are actual and potential problems. Even though the Internet as a media is not easy to restrict or censor, there was the problem during the Kargil war when the Indian government instructed VSNL, which is the main gateway, to block access to Dawn for at least a month and a half. Alongside that of course there was a ban on Pakistan’s state run channel PTV. In Pakistan, there is no problem accessing Indian websites, but since 13 December 2001, the government has banned Indian TV channels. The ban in Pakistan will not be lifted until Pakistani private channels can estab-lish themselves.

There is a lack of symmetry in TV penetration in the two countries. Indian channels, despite the ban, are still watched in Pakistan but with a degree of scepticism. In India on the other hand, PTV is the only Pakistani channel presently available and this seriously affects the projection of Pakistan in India, providing a very blinkered view for the average individual. PTV today lacks the kind of programmes once popular in India in the 1980s when the country’s state-run channel Doordarshan offered only staid, bureaucratic fare. If new Pakistani channels like Indus Vision and ARY are able to pick up and if they project credible news, they could provide a useful window on Pakistan for the average Indian viewer. This could help shape a different popular Indian perception of Pakistan.

India and Pakistan are not reported about as normal societies in each other’s medias. Indian coverage of Pakistan is almost exclusively restricted to bilateral issues, and official concerns, such as terrorism and jehad dominate coverage of these bilateral issues. Even when some attempt is made to delve into Pakistani society, there is very little attempt to deviate from these standard tropes. This is true of Pakistani coverage of India as well. The kind of stories picked up tend to reinforce negative stereotypes.

There are several reasons for this. The first is a lack of sensitivity on the part of journalists, publishers, owners and, to an extent, readers. Prefabricated and routinely invoked formulae determine what the most important issue is. This problem will not go away simply by granting people more visas. Were the Pakistan or Indian government to be more liberal about visas, there will simply be a larger number of people with a preconceived mindset travelling back and forth.

On the second issue, that of media’s access to the other country and its people, there is a very serious problem. Prejudice is compounded by the problem of physical access. Visiting Indian or Pakistani journalists are restricted to a maximum of one or two cities and to a week-long trip at the very most. Invariably these visits are not at a time of the journalist’s choosing. Typically, visas are issued when there is a major bilateral or multilateral event. Consequently, they descend on a city within the confines of a narrowly defined news event and within the confines of a competitive news environment. Professional compulsions limit coverage to the official news event, even if much of it may be inconsequential. During official events such as a SAARC meeting, a journalist cannot deviate too far even physically from the official dele-gation. The officials so tightly control the outflow of news that unless you are within a ten-foot radius of the spokesperson, you are likely to miss the news. This leaves very little time for other stories that break the mould. In this sense the problem of access and visas affects coverage and feeds prejudice.

The technology, the discourse of news, and the idea of what constitutes news also make a difference. Three years ago I went to Pakistan and did a story on an industrial group that had set up a foundation for running schools for under-priviledged kids. I visited one such school outside Lahore where poor kids were being taught for a very nominal fee. The teacher was very proud of her wards. She wanted to impress upon me that all these kids knew English. So she drew a circle and said, “kids what is this?” They all shouted, “sarcal”. She then drew a square, and they shouted “saquwaruh”, just the way it would be pronounced in the Indian Punjab. I sent in this story including the idiosyncrasies of diction. It never saw the light of day. The man at the desk told me “people do not want to read about schools in India, and you are filing a story on schools in Pakistan”.