Those who do not like such shows should send written complaints to the channel’s management or PEMRA.
KARACHI: I could not believe my eyes when I saw on YouTube, a clip of the now infamous show, where a television anchor, along with several other women, who all seem to be her friends, literally invades a public park in Karachi and goes around checking the couples present if they are married, what their relations to each other are and whether they have a marriage certificate with them.
What gave the right or the authority to this woman to ask such silly and intrusive questions? Were the couples doing anything that is obscene or was in violation of the country’s decency laws? Were they engaged in any illegal acts? And even, for the sake of argument, if they were engaged in any such thing, then the authority to check such behaviour lies with the police, not a television anchor.
I remember growing up in Karachi in the 1980s and 1990s and during the time of the first Benazir Bhutto government. The police in Karachi had acquired quite a name for themselves by doing precisely what the anchor did in her show: they would go around harassing couples on the beach or in parks and ask them all kinds of inappropriate questions including whether they had a nikahnama. The matter became so bad that eventually the courts took note of it and admonished the police, telling them that it was not their job to go around checking whether couples in the city’s parks were married or not.
The principle also relates to invasion of one’s privacy. I may be in a park with my wife if I am married, or with my girlfriend, or with a sister or my mother, or my female cousin — what business is it of anyone’s to ask me what my relationship is with that woman if we are not breaking the law.
As Bina Shah has very rightly pointed out, this really is no different than what the morality brigade, led by the Jamia Hafsa students tried to do in Islamabad in 2007, except that in the latter case, they had sticks with them and used them.
Also, the channel which showed this footage should have thought of the consequences that would befall the women who were harassed. For a girl to even go to the park with someone, who she is friends with, in a platonic way is seen as something that is not to be done, especially given the way our society is run and how it operates with regards to the regulation of its female members.
Instead of crying themselves hoarse, those who do not like such shows should send written complaints to the channel’s management or to the state-owned electronic media regulator, PEMRA.
Ali Usman
Published in The Express Tribune, January 25th, 2012.
