I.A. REHMAN - The wages of living by hate
To the people of the
older generation in Pakistan and India, the present level of confrontation
between their countries, especially the war of words between their media
persons, sounds like a steep fall from the standards of mutual understanding
and decency with which they used to treat one another not long ago. There were wars
between the two countries that did not rob the soldiers of respect for each
other’s interest or dignity. We had a full-scale conflict in 1965, but there
was no rupture in diplomatic relations. While tanks collided with tanks,
soldiers in rival camps recognised each other as normal human beings and many
of them treasured memories of days of comradeship. The Pakistan Air Force
chief, Air Marshal Nur Khan, had no doubt wished his men “happy hunting”, but
he was at the same time reported to have secured an understanding with his
Indian counterpart that each other’s industrial and civilian assets would not
be targeted.
This gentlemanly code
of warfare was considerably eroded by the time the 1971 conflict broke out.
Even then, after the surrender at Dhaka, an Indian brigadier sought out a
Pakistani brigadier he had known, took him to his tent for a drink and said:
“What have you done?” More than a tone of victory, or even reproach, these four
words conveyed a feeling of sadness felt by a warrior at the plight of a fellow
warrior.
Today Pakistani poets,
actors and sportsmen are being hounded by Indian gangs. Can we ever forget the
warmth and goodwill Pakistani poets received from India’s political, social and
business elite when they went to Delhi to attend mushairas organised by a
millowner who had suffered heavily at the time of partition. And this was
barely eight or nine years after the bitterness of partition.
Or the competition
between Indian immigration staff when they noticed Ghulam Ali in the queue at
New Delhi airport? How Nusrat Fateh Ali touched the hearts of India’s music
lovers reminds one of the homage paid by Tamil Nadu pundits to Roshan Ara Begum
by describing her as an incarnation of Saraswati. The way Abida Parveen won the
hearts of a big crowd at the Connaught Place is recent history.
As for sports, Raja
Ghazanfar Ali persuaded the governments of India and Pakistan in the
mid-fifties to allow a large number of Pakistanis to watch a cricket match
between the two countries in Amritsar. Many Lahori young men, including
journalists, were able to enjoy hospitality at the houses of Sikh strangers
they decided to knock at. How can one forget the
fact that many Indians cheered Pakistan when they faced England in the 1992
World Cup final or when both Indians and Pakistanis cheered Sri Lanka during
the final against Australia in the 1996 World Cup. There was a sense of
attachment to the people next door that could survive all irritants.
Today an Indian is
prosecuted for cheering a Pakistani team and a Pakistani boy is sent to prison
for applauding Virat Kohli. This change has not
come suddenly. The state agencies have worked energetically for it and media
has made the mistake of playing along.
The newspaper editors
of India and Pakistan had laid the basis of friendship between them while the
first war in Kashmir had not really ended. A tradition of looking at things
unaffected by the state narrative of confrontation grew. After the 1971 crisis
the journalists of India rushed to understand what the new Pakistan was. One
can recall a steady stream of media persons coming to Pakistan – from Dilip
Mukherjee and Nihal Singh, to Rajinder Sarin and Pran Chopra. Their patriotism
did not prevent them from befriending Pakistan.
Later on Shiam Lal,
B.G. Verghese, Kuldip Nayar, Shekhar Gupta, Bhardawaj and Barkha Dutt found it
possible to interact with their Pakistani counterparts. When the Bharatiya
Janata Party started getting the better of Congress a good number of Pakistani
journalists rushed to hear from Vajpayee, Advani and Jaswant Singh what the
change signified.
These interactions
contributed considerably to non-government efforts to promote peace in the region.
Peace activists from both countries were able to meet in Lahore in 1994 and
adopt agreed positions on issues over which the two governments are today
trying to tear each other apart.
And let us not forget
that the call for an “uninterrupted, uninterruptible dialogue” between India
and Pakistan was raised from the platform of a regional media association.
Media jingoism: What has gone wrong?
The rise of politics of exclusion in both countries is a significant factor.
The electronic media’s decision to carry the Kargil conflict into the homes of
Indian and Pakistani citizens did a good deal of mischief. The media failed to
respect the line that separates nationalism from humanism.
Examine: Pak-India media war
From then on, the
media on either side has been losing its capacity to respect the other side’s
history and interest of the masses. It gloats over the destructive powers of
its military and ignores the failure of the two states to feed, clothe and
educate nearly half of their populations. The latest US appeal
to India and Pakistan to stop hostile propaganda against one another is an echo
of a key provision of the Tashkent Accord (1966) and similar clauses in other
bilateral agreements, including the Liaquat-Nehru pact. Unfortunately these
agreements to do away with invective have been honoured more in breach than in
compliance.
It is time the Indian
and Pakistani media realised the great harm to the people of the Sub-continent
caused by their war of words, completely oblivious of the fact that the wounds
caused by words take longer to heal than the wounds made by swords.
The consequences of an
unbridled use of hate material to influence the outcome of a political
disagreement or dispute should easily be visible to everyone. The first
casualty is the media persons’ faculty to separate fact from propaganda.
Whatever is churned out by the propaganda mills of insecurity-driven state
authorities is accepted as the gospel truth and used as the foundation of
arguments that push the contending parties further and further away from mutual
understanding and reconciliation.
The result is that the
media loses its capacity to test the truth in one’s national narrative and to
recognise the truth in the adversary’s narrative. We can recall the
tactics used by the Second World War belligerents to demonise the other. One
big power chose to describe the troops of an adversary as rats and its own war
objective as a holy campaign to save the world from ‘yellow peril’.
Some of these
practices spilled over into accounts of anti-colonial struggles. When the
Vietnamese were labelled as Viet Cong they ceased to be normal human beings and
when the Algerian freedom fighters were identified as “Moslem terrorists” they
lost in the eyes of the European public all of their human entitlements.
The world did learn to
respect the inherent dignity of parties to a confrontation. At the height of
the Cold War, Ronald Reagan could not go beyond characterising the Soviet
system as evil and stopped short of attacking the dignity of Soviet citizens.
Now the Indian and Pakistani journalists, especially in the electronic media,
seem determined to make efforts to demonise the other to unprecedented, and
palpably abused, heights.
They are not content
with attacking the policies and conduct of the rival state; they are forever
looking for the choicest words of abuse for not only the other’s rulers but
also for the entire people.
Unfortunately the
consequences of these hate campaigns are not realised. These practices often
harm their authors more than the targets of their venom. Any people driven by
hate lose the capacity to think straight and appreciate matters in a proper
perspective.
They thus descend from
reasonable behaviour into the abyss of irrationality. The media mercenaries
seem to be out to convert India-Pakistan differences into permanent hostility,
an endless saga of mutually destructive conflict. Previously the people
of the Sub-continent were driven by their governments into confrontationist
postures; now the media is filling hearts and minds with so much of hate and
intolerance that they would not easily let the state leaders move from
confrontation to reconciliation. No greater disservice
to the unfortunate people of India and Pakistan is possible.
Modern states are
becoming less and less amenable to public opinion. The media alone cannot
determine what the states should do, but the world will be a much poorer place
for everyone if it surrendered its right to tell them what they should not do.
Published in Dawn,
September 30th, 2016: http://www.dawn.com/news/1287007
Ignorance is Strength-Freedom is Slavery-War is Peace (George Orwell, 1984)
