Published,2010
The media stands to be the quintessential mode of communication for the electorate. A free and judicious media coveys political narratives without discrimination and allows analytical evaluation of such narratives for the unbiased assimilation of the public. When elements within the deep state and influential political lobbyists seek to reaffirm the status-quo through gagging the free press, the civil society must take a stand for it is the right of the electoral body to have unobstructed access to a factual representation of the socio-political realisms, this close to the voting process.
With elections a hair’s breadth away, such selective gagging of the media stands to strategically shade a true democratic election process. The constitutionally mandated freedom of the press is essential to allow an even playing field to all the contenders and to highlight the inherent discrepancies that seek to cloud the election. Especially at this pivotal junction, when the democratic government is in the process of a turnover, a free media holds the representatives accountable to their pledges and past legacies, countering conspiracy theories, misrepresentation and empty rhetoric. The mandated transparency of the media is crucial in streamlining the facts from the barrage of misinformation and political verbiage that comes with the frenzy leading up to the polls.
Tactics seeking to blackout pivotal political discourses, and mainstreaming choice political party narratives are tantamount to calculated rigging of the electoral process. In lieu of the independent press, TV talk shows- that peddle biased and bigoted views to be imbibed and recited by the general public- have been promoted as the new medium to influence the voter’s opinion. Such dissemination and regurgitation of of a charted political trope can be assumed, with PTI getting the lion’s share of media exposure, and a buffeted PML-N largely represented through a criminal lens. With the lens resolutely focused on the theatrical exchange between the two parties, other mainstream contenders- like the PPP have been curiously left bereft of coverage and alternative platforms such as the Awami Workers Party, and independent voices like Jibran Nasir, have been customarily sidelined.
Intimidating the media seeks to disseminate selective information, and construct an artificial electoral process with the façade of democracy. The coercion of media in Pakistan should be challenged as it will only result in compromising the public and national interest while maintaining the de facto status-quo.
The July 25 election features dozens of parties, with two main contenders: ex-cricket hero Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehree-i-Insaf and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, which vows to win a second term despite the jailing of founder, ex-Prime Minster Nawaz Sharif, on a corruption conviction. Islamic State claimed responsibility for Friday night’s suicide bombing at a rally for the Baluchistan Awami Party (BAP). Among the 130 killed was the party’s provincial assembly candidate Siraj Raisani.
A video clip showed Raisani speaking just before the attack, greeting crowds seated on the ground under a large tent before the blast hit and the image cut off.
A senior party official said the attack would not dent its election hopes.
“It’s a big loss as far as Mr. Raisani is concerned for us ... But will it reverse the course of the political party? No,” said Anwar ul Haq Kakar, a BAP member of Pakistan’s Senate. Pakistan’s campaign until this week had been relatively peaceful, compared with frequent attacks by the Pakistani Taliban during the 2013 election, which saw 170 people killed, according to statistics from the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies.
Then, three attacks over four days killed at least 152 people. On Tuesday, a Pakistani Taliban suicide bomber blew himself up at a rally by the Awami National Party (ANP) in the northwestern city of Peshawar, killing 20 people. Among the dead in Peshawar was ANP candidate Haroon Bilour, whose father, senior ANP leader Bashir Bilour, was himself killed in a 2012 suicide bombing in the city. And on Friday, another bomb struck the convoy of the religious Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal party (MMA) in the northern town of Bannu, killing four people. Although overall violence has ebbed in Pakistan in recent years following an army offensive on militant strongholds in the northwest, both the Pakistani Taliban and Islamic State still launch attacks from across the border in Afghanistan.
Pakistan’s army will deploy about 371,000 troops on election day, almost three times the number in 2013, to protect the polling places.
Despite being denied permission to fly, the PPP chairman travelled by road from Lahore to the Bilour residence in Peshawar.چیئرمین پاکستان پیپلزپارٹی بلاول بھٹو زرداری پشاور میں غلام احمد بلور سے ہارون بلور شہید کی عیادت کررہے ہیں۔@BBhuttoZardari @BakhtawarBZ @AseefaBZ pic.twitter.com/akPccH9O60
— PPP Punjab Social Media Official (@PPPPunjab_SM) July 13, 2018
#PESHAWAR July 13 Danyal Bilour son of #ShaheedHaroonBilour is recalling the terrible scenes of the terrorist attack on his father to the Chairman #PPP @BBhuttoZardari, who visited the Bilour House to offer condolence to the bereaved family on Friday. pic.twitter.com/2eQmere1Y4
— NA 237.PS 89🇱🇾PPP 🇱🇾 Kaleem Baloch (@MKaleemBaloch2) July 13, 2018
A suicide bomber killed 128 people at an election rally in southwestern Pakistan in the second election-related attack on Friday, officials said, amid growing tensions over ousted prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s return ahead of the July 25 vote. The bombing was the most deadly attack in Pakistan in over three years and is the third incident of election-related violence this week. It came as Pakistan’s caretaker government launched a crackdown on political gatherings. Sharif, who was ousted by the Supreme Court last year and convicted in absentia of corruption a week ago, arrived in the country to rally his party ahead of the general elections. Baluchistan Home Minister Agha Omer Bangulzai told Reuters that the death toll in the attack had risen to 128 people, with over 150 wounded. Senior police official Qaim Lashari had earlier said that more than 1000 people were in attendance at the rally in the town of Mastung in the violence-plagued province of Baluchistan. Islamist militants linked to the Taliban, al Qaeda and Islamic State have been operating in the province, which borders Iran as well as Afghanistan. It also has an indigenous ethnic Baluch insurgency fighting the central government.
Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, the group’s AMAQ news agency said. The group provided no further detail or evidence for its claim. In February 2017, Islamic State claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing at a shrine in southern Pakistan, killing 83 people and wounding over 150.
Among those killed in Friday’s attack was Baluchistan provincial assembly candidate Siraj Raisani, whose brother Nawab Aslam Raisani had served as the provincial chief minister from 2008 to 2013. “My brother Siraj Raisani has been martyred,” said Haji Lashkari Raisani, another brother who is also contesting a national assembly seat from Baluchistan.
ATTACKS
Raisani is the second electoral candidate to be killed in pre-election violence this week.
Police had earlier said that the attack targeted Raisani’s convoy but later changed their statement as video footage of a large tent showing damage from the blast was circulated.
Earlier in the day, a bomb blast killed four people in the northern town of Bannu when it struck the campaign convoy of Akram Khan Durrani, an ally of Sharif’s party from the religious Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal party (MMA). A suicide bomber blew himself up at a rally by an anti-Taliban political party in the northern city of Peshawar on Tuesday, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province killing 20 people including Haroon Bilour who was hoping to win a provincial assembly seat in July.
The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack.
Bilour was part of the predominantly secular, ethnic Pashtun nationalist Awami National Party, which has long competed with Islamist parties for votes in Pakistan’s volatile Pashtun lands, along the border with Afghanistan. His father, senior ANP leader Bashir Bilour, was killed in a suicide bombing in late 2012, in the run-up to Pakistan’s last election.
This shatters the narrative that Pakistan has been able to manage the security situation because those at the risk of being attacked are still being attacked. This is exactly what we have witnessed in the case of ANP, where the party has to carefully plan out its movement and refrain from large political gatherings in order to protect themselves and their followers. The party has restricted its canvassing to corner meetings and door to door meetings but these extremists have managed to sabotage them too.
There is absolutely no excuse for why only two police officers accompanied Haroon Biolur despite the imminent threat the party faces. There were reports of threats for party leaders but there was a huge security lapse. It is time we question the statement made by the Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) while taking away the security protocol that terrorist attacks do not make a difference because we all have to die one day. That day came too soon for Haroon Bilour and his late father as well.
This is exactly why parties like the ANP exist - to push the extremist narrative where it belongs because it ends up taking lives. ANP’s history is a history of struggle against the Taliban and this incident is a huge question mark upon the efficiency of the security agencies and the state. This incident is a reminder that the principled position against the mainstreaming of extremist narratives is correct because it helps breed individuals who are inhumane in their outlook. It is unfair to the scores of sacrifices made by our own citizens and parties like the ANP.
Her stern words contrasted with her effusive praise last year for Canada’s embrace of refugees under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. At the World Economic Forum in Davos this year, Malala also questioned Trump’s record on women’s rights. Yousafzai, known widely by her first name, was visiting Rio de Janeiro to kick off the expansion of her education charity, the Malala Fund, into Latin America, starting with Brazil.
Her aim in Brazil, Latin America’s largest economy, is to advocate for more public spending on education, a tall task after the country passed a constitutional amendment freezing federal spending in real terms for two decades in order to reduce public debt.
She also hopes to get an estimated 1.5 million girls currently not in school into the classroom, with a special focus on minority groups who lag white children on key indicators like literacy and secondary school completion.
“It is important for us to reach the indigenous and the Afro-Brazilian population in Brazil. Those girls are facing many challenges,” Malala said in an interview.
In 2014, Malala was made the world’s youngest Nobel laureate, honored for her work with her foundation, a charity she set up to support education advocacy groups with a focus on Pakistan, Nigeria, Jordan, Syria and Kenya. The group’s Brazil presence kicked off with a $700,000 three-year grant for three Brazilian female activists focused on education issues. Malala says she hopes to expand elsewhere in Latin America.
Earlier this year, the 20-year-old returned home to Pakistan for the first time since a Taliban gunman shot her in the head in 2012 over her blog advocating girls’ education.
Weeks ahead of presidential elections in Pakistan, Malala is ruling out politics for herself for now.
“I’m still talking to leaders and ensuring that they prioritize education in their policy,” she said. “It’s easier that way than when you’re on the inside.”
So has the military succeeded in using this crackdown on the media to neutralize its civilian political enemies? Once again, not quite. Sharif, though barred from future political life by the Supreme Court, has been addressing mammoth political rallies in his home province, thus posing a clear challenge to the campaign currently pursued by state institutions. This is the main challenge confronting the security establishment as it works to shape and ultimately dominate the environment of the coming elections. Those in power have devised a new approach for dealing with this apparently chaotic situation. Eager to maintain the facade of caretaker civilian rule, the authorities have refrained from direct censorship. Yet military officials have found other ways to assault constitutionally guaranteed media freedoms. Moves to disrupt newspaper distribution have been accompanied by a series of attacks on dissenting journalists (including sporadic abductions). In June, unknown assailants kidnapped Gul Bukhari, a prominent journalist, and detained her for several hours. The same night, broadcast journalist Asad Kharal was assaulted in public in Lahore. A senior military official prepared the way for this by identifying certain journalists, news channel anchors and social activists as enemies of national security. His statement clearly aimed to put reporters in harm’s way, and led immediately to intense campaigns of harassment on social media. Not surprisingly, newspaper columnists have begun to complain that editors are dropping their articles, and several have resorted to publicizing their rejected commentaries through popular social media platforms. Is this all new for observers of censorship in countries in South Asia and the Gulf region? Actually, yes. We are now witnessing a new form of quasi-military censorship that is astonishingly aggressive in using both threats and coercion. The inevitable result of this program of intimidation is a culture of widespread self-censorship. Zaffar Abbas, the editor of Dawn — one of the leading independent newspapers currently being targeted — has described these self-imposed restrictions as “far more suffocating than martial law.” As Pakistan works its way toward the July 25 elections, the twin strategy of culling the political leadership and curtailing the electorate’s access to information appears to be paying off for the military. But there are signs that this could backfire. The electorate is feeling increasingly abused. The curtain of secrecy drawn on censorship decisions by military officials is slowly crumbling under the impact of increased public awareness of the intimidation campaign. Is there a way forward? Clearly, if Pakistan is to function as a meaningful democracy, the country’s security establishment will have to review its policy of restricting media freedom. The caretakers must adopt impeccable conduct, and the military leadership would be well advised to adopt a strategy of restraint. Otherwise the prospects for democracy in Pakistan appear to be decidedly bleak.
