YouTube Censorship in Pakistan

The whole affair was a disgusting sham. The ploy worked, and thousands of Pakistanis came on streets, while hooligans looted and committed acts of arson. The government then decided to block YouTube until the website removes the sacrilegious movie or at least make it unavailable in Pakistan.

Google usually does that. It blocked access to certain pages on YouTube’s website in other countries where the content was deemed inappropriate, like India and Bangladesh. But it did not do it for Pakistan. So, as the said content remain available, whole YouTube remained, and still remains blocked throughout Pakistan.

I have my reasons to believe our government and its officials has little interest in religion. Neither do they base their decisions on Islam. In fact, it can be argued they are not even remotely sincere to the cause of Islam. Yet, they cite religious reasons to press on the ban on the entire YouTube – which has millions of videos on thousands of different topics including a treasure trove of Islamic videos, when clearly the ban is not even serving the religion.

Rather, I believe that the government apparatus is only keen on suppressing avenues of free speech and whistle blowing which are widely accessible to the general public. Already, YouTube videos have exposed influential media public figures and business tycoons. They regularly lambast political bigwigs, and recently, they have been instrumental in getting the word out to the world from rebellions in Syria and wider Middle East. Government of Pakistan feels much more in charge without such a wayward avenue which was fast becoming part of the mainstream media. The mushrooming growth of broadband connectivity in the last decade have made Internet videos a potent tool at the hands of anonymous reporters and political activists.

The government could not have cited a more indisputable reason to take down Internet media. There is legitimate anger at the small group of miscreants who initiated this devious ploy of instilling unrest in the Muslim world. However, we need to ask ourselves who are we really empowering by banning the entire YouTube. Can the people at the helm of this decision can really be trusted for their sincerity to Islam? Aren’t we making the tyrant rulers stronger by suffocating free media? Are we also not surrendering a very powerful tool to bring down injustice at the orders of these very people who propagate these injustices?

I feel that this debate needs to be taken up in the national discourse. Rather than having a small fanatical pressure group pressing the government, and the government only too happily blocking access to free information, we need to have a more mainstream debate based on reasoning and keeping in view the immense contribution of YouTube to Pakistani society, politics and even religion.

Some of you, who are familiar with these social gatherings, might have already guessed that the visiting card was from none other than our famous techno-entrepreneur Rehan Allahwala. I started pondering that why this guy with such a remarkable IQ and achievements make a fool out of himself by adopting such marketing acts. I discussed my thoughts with few of my close friends and found out that they were equally irritated of such acts, but acknowledged Rehan’s “success” as an entrepreneur.

A few days later, I came across a series of videos posted on YouTube and Facebook, in which Rehan Allahwala had challenged Imran Khan for a Twitter Cup. In one of the videos, Rehan explains that “I can do a better job than Imran Khan’s team in using social media and I can get more followers than Imran Khan in 4 months!” In another video which was more of a response to criticism on him, he clarified that “I don’t plan to contest elections, my main mission is to eradicate poverty from Pakistan and I think the power of mobile can do that. I want to show the power of social media to people!” Some people termed this act of Twitter Cup crazy, while others loved it.

To add to the craziness, one of my friends told me that he was in a short meeting with Rehan Allahwala when Rehan asked for his mobile. Not sure what Rehan could do to the device, he handed over the mobile to Mr. Allahwala. Few minutes later, he found out the he was following Rehan Allahwala on Twitter because Rehan had sent F RehanAllahwala to 40404, which is the short code for Twitter. This is the same guy, Saad, who smiled when he received a cold reaction from a lady in the MPP event.

After digging more into the campaign and other promotional links from Mr. Allahwala’s Facebook profiles and pages, I came across the website for the Twitter Cup and saw both contestants, Imran Khan and Rehan Allahwala, on the main page. Being a fan of Imran Khan more than Rehan Allahwala, I opted to vote for Imran Khan. Not because I don’t like Rehan Allahwala, but because I don’t know him much.

But, wait; I couldn’t see any link to follow Imran Khan on Twitter on the Twitter Cup website. Neither was I able to find a clue about Imran Khan’s Twitter ID! Isn’t that cheating? You can vote for one contestant, but not for the other. I paused for a while and then I decided to review Rehan Allahwala’s social campaigns and online marketing strategies on pure philosophical grounds.

After giving many thoughts, I decided to share my findings on blogs, because I thought that the ‘problems’ identified were not individualistic, but applied to our nation as a whole. Rehan Allahwala might be a super genius and is of course a successful entrepreneur; He wants to be famous, like everyone, but I believe that he and other charged Pakistanis like him, with the exception of few, are missing the core and taking the wrong directions.

People who are remembered throughout history have intrinsic value and they are able to influence history or change its course, not because of the power of technology, but because of their social vision and realization of obligations to society. They are least bothered about themselves, but are more than concerned about their cause and their willingness to uphold the society for that cause. Money and marketing plays a role, but it’s the crust, not the core.

Karl Marx, the revolutionary socialist, was born in a wealthy family. But as he furthered his cause and developed faith in socialism, he moved towards extreme poverty because of selflessness. Out of his 7 children, only 4 survived to adulthood, 3 died because he did not have money to buy medicines! The formation of Soviet Union and China on Marxists concepts was neither a result of marketing strategies, nor self-promotion. Western Philosopher Peter Singer has compared Marx’s widespread influence with Jesus Christ (P.B.U.H.) and Muhammad (P.B.U.H.), because his thoughts revolved around an ‘ethical core,’ rather than efficient use of technology or modern marketing concepts.

Similarly, Allama Iqbal, who is considered the ideological father of Pakistan, is one of the most undisputed leaders for Pakistanis. His remarkable influence on history, widespread acceptance of his poetry and ideas for a separate homeland were not a result of marketing or self-promotion, but the idea in itself was very relevant to the societal conditions and people were attracted to Iqbal’s words. Nehru once stated that the idea of a separate homeland was given so less publicity in press that very few people actually knew about it.

People like Karl Marx, Allama Iqbal and several others have considered self-promotion and getting undue importance a waste of their precious time and a distraction in achieving their goals. The visions of these people were so high, that they found time to be the most precious thing in their lives. They focused more on utilizing their limited time and best of their efforts to further the cause, rather than making a name for themselves. People were pulled to their ideas and thoughts, rather than they pushing their views on audiences. These people worked selflessly and never cared who took the credit.

The dangerous trend of self-promotion through social media rather than cause promotion will not make any difference in Pakistani society, as we were doing the same when we did not have social media. Self-publicity might have become fairly easy because of technology, but the ‘real’ change is change in our thinking and characters. We should have collective causes to further in which founders and owners with ‘celebrity’ status are hard to identify. Successful causes are owned by the society and each and every person participates in furthering it. This process can of course be made fairly efficient with the power of social media.

To strengthen my argument, we have Shoaib Mansoor’s Khuda Ke Liye, Bol and countless dramas that have made remarkable success in Pakistan’s art industry. Very few people had even seen Shoaib Mansoor till someone leaked his picture on Facebook few months back. He avoids self-promotion, publicity and does not even appear for interviews. Some people might take it as another extreme, but this is what our civilization teaches us.

Similary, the world record achieved by Abid Beli and his team has made a mark in Pakistan’s history and that will not be forgotten for ages. I’ve known Abid Beli for years now and have always seen a selfless willingness to serve Pakistan, rather than self-promotion. Even when he had not facilitated the world record last year, he tried to give a vision to people to promote patriotism in their own influential circles and always looked forward to do something that could promote the positive face of Pakistan in the world, and not himself.

Having said all that and with some ruthless criticism and comparison, our real focus should be to agree on a common long-term vision for Pakistan based on moral and ethical grounds. All social activists, entrepreneurs and leaders should participate selflessly in chalking out this vision and should focus more on furthering a national cause than personal causes! History jumps, it does not crawl and nations, not few individuals, should be ready to take the jump!

But over all outlook shows that the focus is on putting together a centralized system with some aspects of democracy. Our feudal culture, history of martial laws and domination of state institutions has restricted our minds to run things with an iron fist or authoritarian ways.

The center of Power in Pakistan

What is lacking in this approach is the realization of diversity in our society. We are a country with diversified ethnic, sectarian and social classes. Many of us cite China as an example and consider their Democratic Centralization as an ideal concept for Pakistan. But, we need to keep in mind that China has a dominant socialist ideology and their culture is pretty much homogeneous. They have a civilization which can be called a Chinese Civilization. On the other hand Pakistan doesn’t have a single Pakistani Civilization. Pakistan is a convergence of several civilizations on both sides of the Indus, which shows different cultural and demographic colors if we move from Karachi to Khyber.

We cannot have a same system for Karachi and FATA or Islamabad and Dera Bugti. Attempts were made by military dictators like Zia, Musharraf and Ayub who tried to implement their self-thought ideologies on the whole country that ended up creating a mess. Similarly civilian technocrats also tried to implement their one-sided vision on the entire country and added more to the mess. Even those who talk about liberalism have their own sectarian, ethnic and social class prejudices backing their ideals.

We need a decentralized system where federal government has minimum authority to run only defense, dispute resolution and few other things. Even with them a concept of voluntary involvement and local considerations need to be taken into account. We need a system where decision making is brought to the local level which will also ensure merit among different localities selecting their leaders.

It is unfair for those who don’t elect a corrupt government, but they also have to the face bad consequences for its actions. To keep things intact we should have a constitutional setup where rules of engagements should be mentioned between different constituencies of the country. In short we need a “Rule of Law based Decentralization.”

This decentralization should be in governance, legislation and economics. This is not something impractical; we can see some colors of it in countries like United States and Australia. Obviously for that we need to consider the ideology which dominated at the time of creation of Pakistan, and which is reflected in the Objective Resolution.

If we talk about examples from Islam then “Meesaq e Madina” can show us how Muslims and Jews made an agreement by accepting each other as a reality. Even in a centralized country like China, they had to make adjustments in Xinjiang and Hong Kong. Even Russia has different republics with some autonomy. In Pakistan’s case, Quaid e Azam made agreements with our tribes which resulted in the tribes becoming part of Pakistan. These agreements allowed the tribal people to maintain their autonomy and also accept few fundamental laws of Pakistan. We need a similar loose structure to avoid clashes between classes.

At the moment power is concentrated to the center and everyone seeks control for it, either through the power of masses or the power of guns. We even cannot afford a democratic system where 90% of people can decide to suppress the remaining 10%. It will create the sense of alienation and hopelessness in the parties not in power and so can result in an undesirable retaliation, which has proved to be damaging for all.

We need to come out of the copycat mentality and be genuine in our approach as our problems are genuine and bit different from where we are trying to import the solutions from. Mutual existence can only prevail through mutual acceptance of each other as a reality.

Ethnic violence in Karachi has taken more lives than suicide bombing victims.

The ethnic mix in Karachi has always been exploited by mainstream political parties. Likewise, the religious parties have also failed miserably to unite people from different origins on common grounds. They seem to be standing far away from the principles of unity and peace, propagated by the religion.

According to reports in international media, the deaths from targeted killings in Karachi have outnumbered the deaths due to suicide blasts in last few years. In 2010, Pakistan lost 1,028 lives due to 335 incidents of suicide bombings, whereas, in Karachi alone people assassinated by ethnically motivated target killers were 1,233. For 2011, the numbers are no different.

The top media outlets of Pakistan are equally responsible for the tense atmosphere of hatred and racism. Sometimes, it feels that the powerful ‘free’ media is playing party to fuel ethnic and sectarian violence in the city, by using inappropriate words, giving imbalanced coverage to either parties and setting agendas before and after incidents of violence and terrorism.

The ground realities have also gone far more bitter than what we perceive from media. Targeted irrational activities by unidentified people, from all ethnicities, in areas such as Abul Hasan Isphani Road, Gulberg, Gulistan-e-Johar and North Karachi are being continuously witnessed by residents.

The ‘actors’ involved in the game are exercising their restless efforts to fuel tensions in these areas by asking citizens to vacate their homes, killing long-settled residents and targeting them with extortion. Religious people with extremist mindsets and citizens with ethnic backgrounds are falling prey to the game. Most of the ‘neutral’ lot has started associating them with one side of the conflict, which is resulting in more polarization.

This emerging culture of hatred and hostility has finally started causing irreversible damage to Pakistan. To add to this, the not so sane political parties are actively tabling around demands for new provinces, just not at the right time. The pro and against ‘debates’ for new provinces in National Assembly and in public meetings are setting agendas for people. The political parties are striking hard when the iron is hot, overlooking the cost people will have to pay.

The civil society, youth and silent majority of Pakistan, which has not been so silent over the last few months, are far more sensible than falling into the trap of dirty politicians.  Social media and other forms of communication have given them more strength than ever. They are indulging actively into shaping the future course of action for politicians and sincere leadership of the country. Its high time the civil society play a role in converging ethnic mix to strength, rather than a weakness.

If people know what they want, they get it!

Imran Khan, the cricketer turned politician of Pakistan

Here one has to admit that Imran Khan certainly has some credentials that make him highly distinguishable in the herd of our usual bureaucrat landlord cum politicians. He has been idealized for his acumen and his educational records are untainted for fraudulence. Add to this his humanitarian efforts that have showcased him as a philanthropist and won the hearts of many. So Imran Khan does indeed make a worthy candidate for the presidency.

Or maybe not. Firstly charity and politics are two separate paths and these paths hardly ever collide. There is no guarantee that a good human being would make a good politician. The dirty game of politics is a hard game to play and an eleemosynary nature or a good ability to play cricket might not be all that is needed. If we are only looking for benevolence of character than Abdul Sattar Edhi would make a better choice. Secondly we need a politician with a strong view that he/she would with hold for a long time. Haven’t we had enough fickle politicians in our past and the same problem continues with our very own super hero. Also the problem with Imran khan’s candidacy is the problem with love marriages. Too much unrealistic expectation and romanticism is involved. In conclusion Imran Khan is just a mere mortal who comes with flaws. That is certainly acceptable as even the ideal image of perfection does not exist. So I wouldn’t be overly critical of Imran Khan. He has some features in his cap and stands a fair chance of winning or losing the next election if he competes.

What is disturbing about the whole equation is how disillusioned our moderate literature liberal Pakistanis are. They glorify Imran Khan as if he is in possession of some supernatural power and as soon as he gets to sit on the proverbial presidential chair all the innumerable crisis that Pakistan faces would disappear into thin air. His supporters support revolution yet the idea of revolution for them is just to get Mr khan elected. I personally believe that Pakistanis have an uncanny and slightly disturbing inclination towards believing in fairy tales.

Lets come back to the land of Pakistan from the land of far far away and analyze things with some amount of realism. Firstly the chances of Imran khan taking the chair are slim even after all the support for bourgeois class. Even if he does become the president a single man cannot change the face of the nation alone. Comparing him to Quaid e Azam further aids the disillusionment as let’s not forget Jinnah had the support of millions of Muslims not only in words but in actions too. Added to this he had many ingenious and honest men and women who helped him throughout his predicaments.Such men and women are unheard of in Threek e Insaaf.

So thinking that just by ticking next to Imran khan’s name in the next election is enough is simply absurd.Imran Khans anti corruption policies that have attracted a lot of his supporters have to be implemented by those supporters themselves too. The bottom line is change has to come from within every Pakistani.As Ghandi quoted :Be the change you want to see in this world.We cannot afford to just sit back,relax and indulge in fantasies of a glorious superman saving us all.

Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto

Benazir Bhutto succeeded twice as prime minister of Pakistan from 1988-1990 and 1993-1996. Thus, she was the first women prime minster in the whole of the Muslim world. On both occasions, she was removed from premiership on the alleged charges of corruption, bad governance and misuse of power and following bad economic policies which generated more poverty, inflation and unemployment. These charges never proved in any court of law.

No wonder she was a ferocious fighter and committed leader to the cause of democracy. Before her departure for Pakistan, I still remember her words vividly, which she spoke at Dubai Airport on October 18, 2007. She said, “though death is staring into my eyes, yet I would go back to my country in order to liberate people, liberate country from the shackles of dictatorship and shackles of extremism and terrorism”. She said that in her last speech at Liaqat Bagh “I put my life in danger and came here because I feel that my country is in danger”. This shows her leadership mettle as leader is the one who is never sacred of trials and tribulation in the journey of democratic struggle.

She was fearless leader despite the fact that she had suffered personal grief with the death of her father, brothers and thousands of workers who challenged the brutal rule of Gen. Zia. Lived five years of solitary life in jail, she knew that there’s no physical come back for speaking truth despite all such personal trials and tribulations. With every passing day, her faith in democracy neither wavered, nor her desire to see democracy return to the country and flourish.

If we take a closer look on the role she played for nation and its people, you will find so many feathers of success to her cap. She gave missile technology, agosta submarine to our navy, she established women bank, women police stations, and women affairs ministry was founded during her first stint in 1988. All these steps suggested that she was committed to the goal of women empowerment in every walk of life. She always encouraged women to participate in politics. She appointed women judges and thousand of lady health visitors to reduce infant mortality. She also spearheaded the moment to make Pakistan polio-free.

Her services for the country were not only confined to the welfare of women, but also her numouros steps on socio-economic front. During her regime, Qasim Port and Steel Mill were expanded; she launched the Keti Bunder and Thar Coal projects, with a view to overcome energy crisis in the country and thereby generates thousands of jobs. She gave jobs to jobless, took steps to improve the system of education and provide health care to people at their doorsteps. In order to eliminate poverty of rural masses, she provied lands to landless haris so that could they improve their lot and live descent and honorable life.

Benazir in her book “Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West” spelt out her vision and new political philosophy which was based political, economic and social democracy, underpinned by good democratic, accountable and judicious governance system. In her book, she criticized west for derailing democracy in the Muslim world and supporting dictatorships which finally paved the way for extremism and talibanisation in the country. In order to rid the country of dictatorship and extremism, she had to negotiate with Musharraf and singed agreement in the form of NRO, for which BB was criticized by her opponents though many analysts believe that had BB not singed NRO with Musharraf, democracy would not have returned to the country.

BB believed in the politics of reconciliation as she learnt over the years that confrontation amongst political forces had derailed the democratic process. It was in this context, she singed CoD in 2006 with PML N in order to strengthen democracy and rule of law.

I believe that, the legacy of PPP can never be shaken as it is the party which has emerged after so many sacrifices, based on basic fundamentals of human needs and their belief of strengthening and empowering the individuals, institutions, and democratic forces is stronger. Nevertheless, it’s the high time that the present government rectifies their flaws, and addresses the needs of drowntrodden as per BB’s dream and philosophy.

Today BB is no more with us, her death wasn’t the only loss of Pakistan, but the loss of hope, determination, and courage that had exists within us, within you, and within me. That is what we lost on 27th Dec, 2007. There are so many conspiracies with regard to her assassination, some says it was Al-Qaida, some say establishment, maybe agencies, or maybe the current government? Whatever the truth is no one knows, but what we should really need to know here is that, BB laid her life for true democracy. Irrespective whether you like it or not her last wave from her car was out of love for her countryman who were languishing under the darkness of dictatorship.

Though she is not with us but she has left with us her rich potical and an intellectual capital in the shape of her ideas, her philosophy of democratic, developmental and secular Pakistan where everyone, without discrimination on the basis of cast, color and religion, can live free life. As she rightly said in her book that, “one can kill the person but not an idea”. So, let us pledge to work for the preservation and promotion of her democratic ideals in order to turn Pakistan in tolerant and vibrant society. Let’s continue her dream. Let democracy do not die with her death in Pakistan.