Anusha Rahman works like a diligent deliverer
IT minister explains how she eventually approached PTCL to help cleansing the net from blasphemous content.
I can but sincerely wish that someone from amongst the horde of self-styled communication gurus, volunteering their services to multiple national security outfits, had spared time to prepare a presentation for ‘our representatives’ sitting in the national assembly. Searching roots of the jingoistic mood prevailing in India these days, the said presentation could easily have found out a plethora of tricks that the security apparatus in that country had employed to promote its narrative regarding the increasing incidents of tensions on the Line of Control.
The ratings-hungry anchors owned this narrative ferociously and thus facilitated the BJP to project and condemn the ruling Congress as a bunch of clueless wimps. Only after appropriate hyping of this narrative, the battle for spins and counter spins was moved to Indian parliament, where the defence minister Antony was forced to switch positions from being pragmatic to finally sound like a hopeless hawk.
The third government of Nawaz Sharif has surely acted wise by not responding to jingoistic noises in India with equal madness. It rather preferred to disregard it by repeated and measured expression of the desire to establishing lasting peace with India through an uninterruptable process of bilateral talks.
On the eve of an exhaustive meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Defense and National Security, someone in the government opted to have second thoughts, however, and before a half-deserted house, Rana Tanveer, the minister for defence production, was assigned to table a resolution in the national assembly Thursday morning. The obvious objective of a badly drafted motion was to express sympathy and solidarity with officers and jawans posted on the border in these difficult times. But the method to execute a serious business looked embarrassingly faulty.
Sheikh Rashid Ahmad did try to lynch this method by throwing patriotic tantrums, but hardly a member from the opposition benches joined him to demolish the half-hearted and lazy-looking ploy. All of them rather competed with each other to seek the Speaker’s attention and grab the opportunity to flaunt their capacity for bombastic rhetoric. Mehmud Khan Achakzai made a sober attempt to stop discussing a serious issue with desultory speeches delivered on random points of order. The Speaker Ayaz Sadiq preferred to act deaf, however.
Prompted by Awais Leghari via another point of order, Ms Anusha Rehman, the minister of information technology, managed to tell us without blushing that an atomic power like Pakistan has no filters to block the blasphemous content spread through the YouTube. A high profile institution with an awe-inspiring title, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, presumably regulates the content available on the net, but this authority is dysfunctional these days for most of its directors had resigned many months ago. Ms Rehman would still want to work like a diligent deliverer single-handedly.
Like a shy yet hard working student, she spoke for too long to explain about how she eventually approached the PTCL to help cleansing the net from blasphemous content. Some wizards of this company volunteered to work day in and day out, but their job seemed doubly complicated. Thousands of URLs are available to your clicks, if you type the words like “innocent” or “Muslim” and then push the search-button. Most of these URLs lead you to “healthy material”, while the sole purpose of banning the YouTube in Pakistan was to block access to a badly made film with sickening use of blasphemous and deliberately provocative content.
Ms Rehman has yet not given up, though. She feels confident that after dedicated and sweating efforts, the wizards loaned to her ministry have now found means to ensure that people accessing the YouTube from Pakistan do not end up viewing the blasphemous film that provoked its banning. Listening to her passionate but softly delivered speech, one felt sorry for this brilliant and hardworking minister of information technology: She can yet not discover that there is a thing called ‘proxy servers’ and even the stern patriarchal states like China and Iran failed to develop any tools to block them.
Capt (retd) Safdar, who had spent many years of exile in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) along with his in-laws during the Musharraf government, asked for the floor after Ms Rehman to tell her and the rest that the KSA has filters that can block the blasphemous content spread through the net. Being the ultimate promoter of Islam, KSA is spending millions all across the world to fight against immoral and blasphemous trends. The Nawaz government should not feel shy to request the KSA for provision of those filters, which appeared working perfectly for the satisfaction of Mr Safdar. Why feel shy to seek help from a brotherly country for a noble cause that can also save Ms Rehman from wasting her talents in seeking solutions to impossible-looking tasks?
Published in The Express Tribune, August 23rd, 2013.
The ratings-hungry anchors owned this narrative ferociously and thus facilitated the BJP to project and condemn the ruling Congress as a bunch of clueless wimps. Only after appropriate hyping of this narrative, the battle for spins and counter spins was moved to Indian parliament, where the defence minister Antony was forced to switch positions from being pragmatic to finally sound like a hopeless hawk.
The third government of Nawaz Sharif has surely acted wise by not responding to jingoistic noises in India with equal madness. It rather preferred to disregard it by repeated and measured expression of the desire to establishing lasting peace with India through an uninterruptable process of bilateral talks.
On the eve of an exhaustive meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Defense and National Security, someone in the government opted to have second thoughts, however, and before a half-deserted house, Rana Tanveer, the minister for defence production, was assigned to table a resolution in the national assembly Thursday morning. The obvious objective of a badly drafted motion was to express sympathy and solidarity with officers and jawans posted on the border in these difficult times. But the method to execute a serious business looked embarrassingly faulty.
Sheikh Rashid Ahmad did try to lynch this method by throwing patriotic tantrums, but hardly a member from the opposition benches joined him to demolish the half-hearted and lazy-looking ploy. All of them rather competed with each other to seek the Speaker’s attention and grab the opportunity to flaunt their capacity for bombastic rhetoric. Mehmud Khan Achakzai made a sober attempt to stop discussing a serious issue with desultory speeches delivered on random points of order. The Speaker Ayaz Sadiq preferred to act deaf, however.
Prompted by Awais Leghari via another point of order, Ms Anusha Rehman, the minister of information technology, managed to tell us without blushing that an atomic power like Pakistan has no filters to block the blasphemous content spread through the YouTube. A high profile institution with an awe-inspiring title, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, presumably regulates the content available on the net, but this authority is dysfunctional these days for most of its directors had resigned many months ago. Ms Rehman would still want to work like a diligent deliverer single-handedly.
Like a shy yet hard working student, she spoke for too long to explain about how she eventually approached the PTCL to help cleansing the net from blasphemous content. Some wizards of this company volunteered to work day in and day out, but their job seemed doubly complicated. Thousands of URLs are available to your clicks, if you type the words like “innocent” or “Muslim” and then push the search-button. Most of these URLs lead you to “healthy material”, while the sole purpose of banning the YouTube in Pakistan was to block access to a badly made film with sickening use of blasphemous and deliberately provocative content.
Ms Rehman has yet not given up, though. She feels confident that after dedicated and sweating efforts, the wizards loaned to her ministry have now found means to ensure that people accessing the YouTube from Pakistan do not end up viewing the blasphemous film that provoked its banning. Listening to her passionate but softly delivered speech, one felt sorry for this brilliant and hardworking minister of information technology: She can yet not discover that there is a thing called ‘proxy servers’ and even the stern patriarchal states like China and Iran failed to develop any tools to block them.
Capt (retd) Safdar, who had spent many years of exile in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) along with his in-laws during the Musharraf government, asked for the floor after Ms Rehman to tell her and the rest that the KSA has filters that can block the blasphemous content spread through the net. Being the ultimate promoter of Islam, KSA is spending millions all across the world to fight against immoral and blasphemous trends. The Nawaz government should not feel shy to request the KSA for provision of those filters, which appeared working perfectly for the satisfaction of Mr Safdar. Why feel shy to seek help from a brotherly country for a noble cause that can also save Ms Rehman from wasting her talents in seeking solutions to impossible-looking tasks?
Published in The Express Tribune, August 23rd, 2013.