Tidbits of the region’s media
Pakistan's health secretary, Khushnood Lashari, made an astounding proclamation recently: no one was allowed to conduct medical relief operations in flood-hit Jacobabad (in Sindh), because – wait for it! – the Shahbaz Airbase in the area has been leased to the US for launching drones. The drama, however, didn't end there. More mud was slung all over, political vendettas and feudal rivalries were aired, and a former prime minister and known establishment lackey, Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali, jumped into the fray. As astounding as the entire episode was, there followed an almost complete media blackout on the subject within Pakistan.
The airbase has reportedly been used by the US since before 2001. And while the current government can certainly be blamed for not doing anything about it, it can safely be assumed that the base was leased not by 'bloody civilians', but during the tenure of some army-wallah. Chhetria Patrakar is forced to wonder, then, whether the media blackout is a case of overzealous self-censorship, or if pressure was applied from the real powers-that-be in Pakistan – the wallahs referred to previously. The US embassy in Islamabad, meanwhile, scrambled to 'clarify' its position, referring to the 'allegations' as false and laying the blame firmly at the doorstep of the Pakistan Air Force. Either way, CP calls out shenanigans. Also, why waste drones, when you can simply cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians in one go by denying them their 'inalienable' right to emergency medical relief? Eh?
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While on the subject of colonialism, the dreaded East India Company has made a comeback! This time around, however, it is owned and operated not by a gora saheb, but a bonafide brown one. The genius in question is a certain Sanjiv Mehta, an entrepreneur from London, who decided to appropriate this symbol of the Raj and relaunch is as a luxury food store. The new version of the East India Company is devoid of an army though, and while Mehta eventually hopes to source luxury goods from India, the company is said to have no expansionist plans – beyond the usual corporate ones, of course.
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Along with almost everyone and everything else (or so it seems) in Delhi, autorickshaw-wallas have also been swept up in the Commonwealth Games frenzy. Calm down, they aren't offering discounts or free rides – they are, in fact, in trouble. Many would respond to that with a hearty 'finally!', but CP thinks now might not be the time for some schadenfreude (that's German for 'what a silly thing is happening in your neighbourhood!'). Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit plans to 'phase out' autorickshaws, ostensibly because they 'harass' passengers (a-HA!) and ply their trade illegally. A mole says, however, that the real reason is that autos don't really fit in with the chief minister's image of a 'truly civilised city', which is how she wants visitors to the Commonwealth Games to think of Delhi. Okay, seriously now, what on earth is a 'truly civilised city'? And what next, one wonders – phasing out wailing kids, pollution and nitwit drivers? On second thought, who wouldn't move there?
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The Press Council of India (PCI), meanwhile, has gone ahead and shot itself (and its credibility) in the foot. Not too long ago, the PCI had set up a subcommittee to investigate the phenomenon of 'paid news', which had reared its head during the recent Lok Sabha elections. The investigations resulted in the production of a thoroughly damning report, which the PCI then decided to suppress because, among other things, it 'named names'. One would think that the PCI would realise that the fourth pillar of the state can't really be a societal watchdog without maintaining any check whatsoever on its peers – but if one thought that, one would be wrong. In any case, a new, wishy-washy 'final' version of the report refers to the explosive original only in a footnote, stating that the latter might 'remain on the record of the Council as a reference document'. CP wonders whether media organisations that are currently going full-throttle at alleged corruption involving the Commonwealth Games – naming names left, right and centre – really understand the concept of 'double standard'.
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Speaking of double standards, journalists in Kashmir are currently furious, both with their Delhi-based counterparts and the state government. They claim that, in an attempt to garner 'favourable' coverage of the rather unfavourable unrest in Srinagar, officials clamped down on them by withdrawing their curfew passes – even while they gave Delhi-based journalists and TV channels easy access to curfew-bound areas. The Srinagar-based media protested, with channels halting broadcasts and newspapers not printing for four days. But the powers-that-be remained unmoved. The clampdown, however, was not restricted to reporters from Srinagar and, according to some reports, an NDTV crew and reporters from the LA Times and BBC Urdu service were also beaten up.
One hopes that New Delhi learned a lesson from this debacle: curtailing telecommunication networks and roughing up journalists might suppress news for a while, but neither method really ensures a blackout. (Unless one counts the self-imposed ones by outraged journalists.) The only foolproof way of avoiding 'unfavourable' coverage is to not let events that trigger such coverage happen in the first place – but that is, perhaps, too obvious a truth for trigger- and ban-happy Southasian governments.
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In a fit of (misplaced) patriotism, a certain minister in Pakistan is demanding a ban on Bollywood films during Eid 'in order to promote the local film industry'. The minister claims that filmmakers from Pakistan have complained to him that cinemagoers ignore their movies in favour of 'glitzy Bollywood productions'. Minister saheb and the filmmakers in question are in deep, deep denial, CP thinks. Anyone who has ever had the misfortune of watching a 'Lollywood' production would rather stay home and stare at the walls – and not nice ones; boring ones – than sit through another sorry attempt at barely concealed soft porn (the keyword being 'sorry attempt', not 'soft porn', just so we're clear).
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Still on the subject of Pakistan, one of the country's top producers of conspiracy theories, the English-language daily newspaper The Nation, claimed recently that Foreign Minister Khurshid Mehmood Kasoori was kanoodling secretly with his Israeli counterpart, in an attempt to establish dangerous diplomatic ties between the two countries. Now this piece of news might have been believable (and cause for celebration), were it not for a number of surrounding facts, one being a nugget from the report that states that the talks were facilitated by 'the chief of a religious [sic] party of Pakistan'. What better way to relax after a long, tiring day of demonising and demanding the death of 'evil Jews' and burning Israeli flags than to moonlight as a facilitator for Pakistan-Israel talks?
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India and Pakistan, meanwhile, seem to finally have been brought together – as producers of a mysterious, drug-resistant 'superbug' that has allegedly infected people in Australia and even caused a death all the way over in Belgium! The bug is said to have been first detected last year in a Swedish patient in India. Since then, however, it has somehow managed to evade visa restrictions, cross the Line of Control, and infect (and kill) a Belgian who was visiting Pakistan. Dear neighbouring countries, when everyone wished you would collaborate on something, they had hoped the result would be productive – not a mysterious 'superbug' that goes around infecting and killing tourists and visitors. Leave that to, say, the strange new Relationship of Repugnant Regimes between Burma and North Korea.
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The Kathmandu zoo, on the other hand, has decided to be productive. The authorities concerned have resolved to go the 'Hum tum ek kamrey mein band ho, aur chaabhi khho jaey' ('the two of us are locked in a room, and have lost the key' – yes, the essence is quite lost in translation) way for the zoo's pair of endangered, one-horned rhinos, which have been resolutely refusing to mate. The hapless pair will reportedly be closeted in what is being referred to as a 'honeymoon suite' because it is larger than their previous enclosure and has mud floors, instead of concrete. If only the authorities concerned had thought of this before and tried it with candidates vying for the post of prime minister, Nepal might have a new PM in less than 100 attempts, the constitution would have been ready, and everyone would've lived happily ever after. Nevertheless, CP is taking bets now – 10:1 says that Kathmandu will get a baby rhino before it gets a new prime minister. After all, you only need one horn to be horny.
– Chhetria Patrakar