Caught between Zee and Zia

Most Pakistanis understand Hindi, and so they watch Zee TV. What to do? Some say better this than the state-run propagandist medium bequeathed by Gen Zia-ul Haq.

It is a cold March evening in a tiny mountain village, a few miles north of the popular hill station of Murree. Crowded together in a small house alongside a river, a group of 40 men and children, warmly wrapped against the chill in shawls and traditional woollen hats, has gathered around a television set. They are watching a typical Zee TV transmission, dominated by gyrating screen stars and tunes from popular Hindi film hits.

The owner of the sec was the first to install a dish antenna in the village, and since it was set up a few months ago, people gather before it every night. Apart from the occasional PTV (Pakistan Television) drama serial or news bulletin, the most popular choice is Zee TV and EL— partly because all the other available channels air programmes mainly in English which, obviously, holds little interest for these villagers.

The viewers seem unclear as to where the transmissions emanate from, although a few youngsters mention a 'huge station' which is 'based on a rocket'. A 21-year-old wagon driver, Darshan, explains, 'We like to watch mainly the Hindi songs and films as this gives us something to enjoy. Otherwise we had just PTV, which shows nothing but news and discussions by politicians'.

This, of course, is not strictly true, but what is beyond dispute is that the Indian programmes beamed out by Zee, Jain, ATN, EL, Sony, Movie Club are more entertaining than local programmes and are widely watched. The irresistibility of Hindi programmes is also due to the fact that Hindi is understood by virtually everyone in Pakistan, not to mention the huge popularity enjoyed there by Bollywood film stars.

'This has always been the kind of entertainment people have gone for, it allows them an escape into a world of fantasy and romance so, naturally, when it is so widely available, they will turn to it. Before satellite TV, Indian radio stations playing songs were tuned in to all the time,' says Saiqa Haider, a post-graduate sociology research student based at Leeds University in the UK.

Ms Haider is studying the influence of the satellite revolution and has just returned from the conservative Dera Ghazi Khan area in rural Baluchistan. She reports that in some of the remote parts of Pakistan, out of reach of even PTV, satellite dish antennas pull in Hindi programming with clear reception. 'This is suddenly bringing before the people a totally new impression of life, in terms of the modern Hindi plays, films, and so on,' she says.

'On the longer term, this will undoubtedly have an impact,' she says, citing the case of an elderly Baloch woman who, after watching a play on Zee, refused to believe that young, unaccompanied women 'wear such daring clothes in public'. Her granddaughters, who do not attend school, are not allowed to watch, for fear they will be ´corrupted´.

Hindi Rout
Access to satellite transmission is now widespread in urban and rural Pakistan. With the cost of locally made dish antennas and receivers having fallen to as little as PKR 6000, a growing number of middle-class homes now receive the transmissions. The most popular stations are Zee and EL, mainly because antennas capable of receiving the AsiaSat signal are more commonly owned. After BBC switched over to the PanAmSat-4 system in April this year, or because they wanted to catch espn´s sports programming, a number of people did instal a new antenna and polariser which gave them access not only to the BBC news but also to Sony, TNT, ABN, ESPN, Movie Club, Chinese channel and Discovery.

The Jain and MTV signals are also available, but reception is poor. However, dish antenna dealers in Lahore report that more new buyers are opting for either access to the PanAmSat-4 system, because it offers more Hindi language networks, or antennas which can be manually rotated to catch a greater variety of channels.

Pakistan as yet has no cable TV system, although the first such scheme is presently being set up in Karachi. The director of Pay TV, as the company is called, Air Marshal (retd) Shafique Haider, is adamant that no Indian channels will be offered through the cable network 'because we don´t want to promote Indian culture or the propaganda they are showing'.

Even so, Zee is the most popular channel and is commonly watched in hundreds of thousands of households around the country. The popularity of the Hindi films and songs, compared to which Pakistani film songs seem staid, is immense. But even though the audience for these programmes, along with game shows such as Close-up Antakshari is huge, most people seem defensive when asked about their viewing habits.

'There´s nothing wrong with the Zee songs, we switch them off if they are too vulgar and the children are watching, and we don´t watch the news on Zee TV because it is nothing but propaganda,' says Mohammad Farhan, a bank manager. This attitude is common, with many complaining that the news on Zee and programmes like Aap ki Adaalat are biased.so

But at the same time, most also admit that they do watch the entertainment programmes churned out round the clock by these channels. Some, like Islamabad-based advertising executive Kamran Zafar, also admit privately that Zee news, for example, is well presented and ´more balanced´ than the news on PTV.

Undoubtedly, the satellite revolution has had its impact on Pakistani television. Both PTV and the semi-private STN (Shalimar Television Network) have borrowed from the success of Zee and EL, among others. Coinciding with the growing liberalisation which followed the end of the martial law era of General Zia-ul Haq in 1988, many of the film and pop music programmes on both of Pakistan´s earth-bound networks mimic the Zee, EL or V Channel style of presentation. Hep young presenters here increasingly adopt the new lingua franca of the airwaves: a blend of Urdu and English which is today much in vogue. STN is also advertising that it will soon begin a series of 'Zee TV-style' game shows.

The ´Zee-ification´ of Pakistani society is not universally interpreted as a healthy development. Most satellite channels, some of which are struggling for survival, concentrate on providing cheaply produced, popular entertainment programmes. There is little room for quality documentary slots, programmes highlighting social issues, and so on. Prominent documentary film-maker Mushtaq Gazdar, whose controversial films on a variety of social issues, including religious bigotry, have won international acclaim, is scathing in his criticism of Hindi satellite channels.

'They are promoting only a glamorous and soapy way of life, with a heavily entertainment-based song-and-dance format,' he says. 'Glamour in this form is in some ways an early form of prostitution.' Mr Gazdar regrets that there is so little room on these channels for programmes highlighting the realities of life in South Asia. However, he concedes that, from the Pakistani point of view, even the form of liberalisation offered by these channels may not be entirely negative. After the Zia period with its conservative, so-called Islamic policies, any form of liberalisation is welcomed. Even if this should take the unfortunate form of women promenading down a catwalk, at least it serves the purpose of making a wider variety of activities acceptable in public.

Not surprisingly, the Islamic clergy has been harsh in its attacks on the satellite channels, and particularly the Indian networks. The right-wing Jamaat-i-Islami routinely accuses them of spreading 'immorality and propaganda'. Newspaper columns and letters to the editor in some sections of the press propagate the same view, with the conservative Nawa-e-Waqt Urdu language daily calling recently for a ban on 'naked women and other indecency'. Late last year, at the Punjab University campus, which is patrolled by the Islami Jamiat-e-Tulaba (ijt, the student wing of the Jamaat), a student was badly roughed up for maintaining that some Indian channels provided good programmes for the youth.

But this hostility towards the satellite channels seems to be a minority perspective. Perhaps reflecting the fact that religious parties have never gained even a two percent representation in the Pakistani legislature, their views on many issues hold little real weight. There is little doubt that satellite channels now available across Pakistan are here to stay and be seen

~ K. Hyat is a journalist with The News, Lahore.