Ride to the moon

Qadri's was a media show. The media gave him the stage to do the show. D-Chowk was the studio with 50 cameras rolling.

The Islamabad container drama, jointly staged by Dr Tahirul Qadri and the federal government, holds important lessons for all of us, that is, if we are willing to learn.

The first is that if those in power are bent upon fooling the nation, they can do so with utmost success and without much challenge — especially, if the fraud is incrusted with bewitching slogans of revolution and democracy. The so-called revolution at core was an attempt to activate a particular type of religious vote bank in the heartland of Punjab that would benefit the Pakistan Muslim League-Q (PML-Q) and the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), whose fortunes in this politically powerful province are fairly precarious. Since their opponent, the Pakistan Muslim League-N, seems to be drawing on the strength of more hardcore Deobandi and Alh-e-Hadith voters, the softer religious variant, the Barelvis, could be given a cause to rally around the PML-Q-PPP combine. This primarily explains the overflowing enthusiasm of the Q leadership to champion the cause of the Long March Declaration, whose real worth is less than the paper it is typed on. The international backing to this illusory tale of fictional revolution of the people, by the people and for the people, had to be there because a 'softer mullah' holds irresistible charm for the policy of promoting (or inserting) winning moderates in the world of Islam. So, it came to be — the four-day long saga, with its dazzling contradictions and exceptional media hype. In the beginning, even the most educated among us thought it to be real: such is the desperation to find an instant solution to our wide-ranging problems. They thought the day of final judgement is finally upon this terrible system of pelf-based on plunder, not realising that the system is so well-entrenched that no individual — certainly not Dr Qadri — shall ever be in a position of holding it to account.

The second lesson is that this nation cannot take to be true all that appears on the media. This industry, like all industries, always had flaws and shortcomings. Long before television invaded national life, the seemingly serene waters of print journalism had terrible troubles of dishonesty and rigged news swirling just beneath. Editorials could be hatchet jobs and opinion pieces could be full of crochets because the writer was bought off. With the advent of private television, these chronic frailties have now become a full-blown disease. It spreads like an epidemic once triggered by devious individuals and their equally dubious money. The grand benefits of good messages reaching out to millions in no time, which cannot be denied, now have an equally weighty downside: propaganda overwhelming the market of opinion. Barring a few exceptions, the media, by and large, behaved like the unsuspecting crowd on the road that swayed and swirled to the high-sounding oratory of Dr Qadri. Acutely aware of the need to have the eyes and ears of the media permanently available to him, the passionate cleric made it a point to halt tackling even the most revered and sacred subjects if he found out that a messy wire had deprived a certain section of people to his sound or picture. His was a media show. The media gave him the stage to do the show. D-Chowk was the studio with 50 cameras rolling. Dr Qadri was the anchor with four-days airtime guaranteed.

There is not enough information available with me to suggest that this exceptional coverage was due to the money-factor. It could just be poor editorial judgement, which is quite possible, considering how little thought goes into news planning these days. Or it could just be competition. One heavy-hitter takes up a subject so the other one must follow suit, and so on. Political and sectarian leanings could also be a factor. It is amazing how deeply-rooted such biases have become in our media system and how audacious is our pretension that we are safe from such parochial divisions. The reality is that staff gets hired and fired on the basis of sectarian leanings and newsrooms and editorial boards are filled with party affinities, and yet, they all wear the garb of being unbiased and pass themselves as balanced journalists. Dr Qadri, endorsed by the MQM, appealed to a certain category of the media and they deified him. But money, too, was there. The ads, the paid content, the soft interviews and the celebrations at the ‘positive culmination’ of the Long March could not just be the result of lack of professionalism and unsound editorial judgement. These carried the unmistakable ideogram of cash at work.

The third lesson is that if you want to avoid the pain of being led up the garden path by a clever cleric, a fake revolutionary, a deceiving democrat, a misleading leader and a (potentially) misdirected media, use your own judgement, arrived at through careful study of individuals and their backgrounds. This place has become a gangster’s paradise. Sifting the good from the bad requires application of mind. Without this resource, the next container ride will take you to the moon and drop you from there.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 24^th, 2013.