Over the top

Last week, one heard about the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority’s (PTA) decision to impose a partial ban on The Baloch Hal, the first and only online newspaper that tells the story of Balochistan to the rest of Pakistan and the world-at-large. The reason for the ban, according to the PTA, was that The Baloch Hal published ‘anti-Pakistan material’. As expected, this vague claim remains unsubstantiated.
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Urooj Zia writes about Pakistan’s recent categorisation as the most porn-hungry country on Google.com

Picture courtesy longislandfilm.com

Google has ranked Pakistan number 1 in the world in searches for pornographic terms, outranking every other country in the world in searches-per-person for certain sex-related content, according to a recent FoxNews report.

One could laugh this off, but what comes next is fairly disturbing. Secret ‘bestial’ passions apparently run high (and deep… and wild) in Pakistan. According to Google, the country has, since 2004, ranked number one in the world for per-person searches for ‘horse sex’. Pakistan has thumbed its nose at the world for per-person searches for ‘donkey sex’ since 2007, and ‘dog sex’ since 2005. One also worries about the citizens, especially women, living in a country which left the rest of the world behind between 2004 and 2009 in its quest for ‘rape pictures’ on the internet. Children are also of interest: between 2004 and 2007, and then again in 2009, users from Pakistan ranked number 1 in the search for ‘child sex’.

One would think that a country where courts went haywire in May this year – and threatened a repeat performance a month later – by banning more than a thousand webpages, including giants such as Facebook and Youtube, for ‘offensive’ and ‘blasphemous’ content, would be more vigilant when it comes to pornography. Not a chance. ‘We have orders only to ban blasphemous content. We’ll deal with pornography if and when we have the orders to do so. We don’t have any such orders yet,’ Khurram Mehran, the public relations officer for the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), had said back in May.

In the public space in Pakistan, young couples are harassed by the police and prosecuted under the law even if they hold hands or hug. Small wonder then that hormone-tortured young adults turn to the interwebs. In the wake of the FoxNews report, one can almost imagine the local religiocrats taking to the streets, blaming the internet, Jews, Christians, Hindus, RAW, Mossad, the CIA, and their aunts for the ‘declining morals of our youth’, completely disregarding the fact that the users in question searched for what they did voluntarily. Death to the infidel internet!

In retrospect though, I actually hope the PTA and other random authorities and officials concerned don’t overreact to the news report (which, incidentally, has been picked up and used widely by several Southasian media outlets) and block online pornography in Pakistan. For starters, it would definitely make the lives of women – especially working women – in the country even more miserable. At the moment, twisted minds (and going by what Google has to say, there seem to be quite a few of those in Pakistan) find an outlet for their random fetishes (bestiality!) in free porn which they can watch online or download, complete with viruses, trojans, and other assorted bugs. If their quest for ‘rape pictures’ or ‘child sex’ is suddenly blocked off, one can only imagine the amount of harassment – and worse – that women will be subjected to in the public space. To top it all, it’s not like the courts are very cooperative when it comes to women’s rights – the conviction rate for rape cases in Pakistan is almost negligible; and many incidents aren’t even reported for fear of being stigmatised and ostracised. She ‘asked for it’, after all, didn’t she? So goes the inference, oftentimes.

For the sake of the women of the country, then, if nothing else: Dear PTA, please let porn be. As for the disturbing Google searches, Ass-oholics Anonymous, anyone?

— Urooj Zia is the Assistant Editor (web) at Himal Southasian.

By Urooj Zia

Professor Nazima Talib from the Mass Communication Department of the University of Balochistan, Quetta, passed away on 27 April 2010. A group of her students, current and former, set up a Facebook group soon after: “Madam Nazima was not only a teacher, but a mother and a friend to all of her students. We will miss this great teacher forever. We love you ma’am.”

Prof Talib was 48 years old, and she certainly did not die of natural causes. She was gunned down in front of the university campus. While she is not the first teacher to be killed in this manner in Balochistan, she is the first female teacher to fall victim to a phenomenon which is so common here that people here actually have a term for it: ‘targeted killing’. Prof Talib was targeted and killed, but no one is sure why. Despite the fact that the province is overrun by one of the most advanced spy agencies of the world, no one really has any clue as to who the culprits were – or so it is claimed.

The Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), one of the Baloch nationalist groups engaged in guerrilla warfare against what they refer to as the “colonising Punjabi Army”, has, meanwhile, come forward and accepted responsibility for the murder. They claim that it was an act of “revenge” against “Punjab” for the recent death of the mother of a Baloch nationalist activist at the hands of the Frontier Constabulary (FC), the paramilitary force which exercises control over almost all of Balochistan.

It all started on April 17, when the body of a Balochistan Shia Conference leader’s son, who had also fallen victim to targeted killing, was taken to the Sandeman Civil Hospital in Quetta for a post-mortem. Journalists and policemen had just gathered at the hospital, when it was rocked by a powerful suicide blast, which left 11 people (including a journalist) dead, and more than 40 injured. The Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LJ), a banned extremist Sunni, militant outfit, had later claimed responsibility for this attack, which it claimed was aimed against Shias.

The state machinery rolled into motion –  a massive, overnight search operation was launched in Quetta, albeit only in the Baloch-majority areas, ostensibly to round up LJ militants and sympathisers. More than 200 Baloch activists were rounded up, and the mother of a Baloch nationalist activist was allegedly beaten to death by the FC; all this even while the FC turns a blind eye to the openly pro-Taliban slogans that adorn the walls in parts of Quetta.

Prof Talib apparently fell victim to a “retaliatory attack” which was aimed at somehow avenging the death of the Baloch activist’s mother. But, senseless and unpardonable as this act was, who can be held responsible for Prof Talib’s murder? Can blame be placed solely at the doorstep of the BLA? Or should the FC be held responsible for the activist’s murder? Or the LJ? Or the various elements within the state who have allegedly encouraged and provided protection to groups such as the LJ, while treating the Baloch so shoddily that it is as if they don’t even consider them human?

In killing Prof Talib, the BLA has broken all norms of the very Baloch culture that it claims to uphold and protect. This cycle, however, neither began nor ends here. Some time over the past 63 years, a chain of events was set into motion, which led, on 27 April, to Prof Talib’s murder.

Perhaps these events were set into motion at the time of independence, when Balochistan was, according to the Baloch, forcefully annexed by Pakistan. Then, a full-scale army operation was launched in the province in the 1970s under the government of Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) founder Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and brute force was used to quell the rumblings of discontent in the province. As if this wasn’t enough, soldiers hailing from Punjab and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa were then posted in Balochistan and given free rein in the region.

This series of events, and many more in the middle, has led to a blanket hatred of all things Punjabi becoming ingrained in the minds of the people of Balochistan, particularly among political activists from the region. “Someone occupies your house; you’re not able to push them out, so you kill one of their chickens,” one of them said when I asked him about the targeted killings of Punjabis in Balochistan.

At the other end of the spectrum, for a section of the urban Sindhi population, a majority of Punjabis, and part of Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa, the Baloch are the ‘violent other’ who are hell-bent on destroying the state. A blanket condemnation of the ‘Sardars’ (tribal lords) of Balochistan is issued every time the lack of development in the province is mentioned, despite the fact that the Sardari nizam (tribal system) has never existed in significant parts of Balochistan. Some of the greatest ideologues of the Baloch nationalist movement have emerged not from the areas ruled by ‘tribal lords’ but from the southern districts of the province, which have historically been free of the Sardari nizam.

While Baloch activists need to differentiate between the state and the people of Punjab, the rest of the country needs to realise that Balochistan, like most of Southasia, is a complicated region. One cannot hope to do justice to it without digging under the propaganda-riddled surface and at least trying to understand the issues of the Baloch in a nuanced manner. The demonisation of ‘the other’, meanwhile, shows no sign of letting up. The lessons of 1971 have obviously been lost on those who were responsible for that debacle in the first place.

Urooj Zia is a journalist based in Karachi

[Edits May 2, 2010: The article previously stated that on April 17, the body of a Punjabi-speaking banker was brought to the Sandeman Civil Hospital in Quetta. The victim was actually the son of a Balochistan Shia Conference leader. The error is regretted. ~ UZ]