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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It has come to the attention of the long latent communications department of the Nepali Dada Party that the millions and millions of its Indian cohorts are requesting the Nepali Dada Party to intervene and correct the gross incompetences and negligence that is being exhibited by the Government of India. (more…)
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.
May
24
2010
By Roman Gautam
Earlier this month India turned to the WTO to resolve its latest quarrel with Europe’s pharmaceutical giants, filing a complaint over seizures of generic Indian drugs transiting through Europe. The two seizures sparking this flare-up, one in Paris and the other in Berlin in 2009, are only the latest in a much longer list of similar seizures. The EU acted after European firms complained that the drugs in question violated European patents, thus allowing them to be ‘detained’ under current European customs law. India insists that EU customs regulations, including reforms promised recently in an effort to diffuse the current dispute, remain in violation of WTO trade rules. After India made some painful concessions to join the WTO, it is time for the WTO to defend India from European pharmaceuticals’ bullying.
India’s thriving pharmaceutical industry is the result of laws enacted in the 1970s that allowed companies to disregard foreign patents, reverse engineer the latest drugs, and pump out high quality generic versions that cost a fraction of the originals. When India joined the WTO in 1995, it, just as every other signatory, accepted the WTO agreement on TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights). The agreement gave India until 2005 to adopt and enforce legislature respecting foreign pharmaceutical patents registered in the country, which effectively put a squeeze on generic manufacturing that led to very sizeable losses of jobs and revenue.
The idea behind the WTO is that the necessary concessions to join gain members certain protections. Among these is the free transit of goods, which the EU’s seizures clearly violate. As per current WTO rules, regardless of the drugs’ legal status in Europe, Europe must allow their free transit so long as they do not violate patents registered in either the country of origin or destination. By that criteria, these shipments, bound for various African and Latin American nations, are entirely legitimate.
Taking a broader view of the issue, the WTO must defend India unless it is to appear the corporations’ lapdog, which has been a persistent and valid critique of its TRIPS enforcement in the smaller economies. The WTO’s critics point out that a look at the winners and losers of patent enforcement leaves no doubt as to whose interests TRIPS serves. Indian pharmaceuticals’ loss has meant large European and American pharmaceuticals gain, allowing them a monopoly on vital drugs such as anti-retrovirals, which they now price out of the range of the world’s poorer nations. Yes, there is a strong argument for enforcement of intellectual property (IP) rights in order to promote innovation, but how long can the WTO continue to promote corporate profit without regard to global public health?
And on that count, the EU’s current actions cannot help but raise eyebrows considering Europe’s substantial commitments, both vocal and financial, in support of global health and development. The current WTO dispute will test if the EU can stand by its word in the face of pressure from big business. The fact that the EU has legal loopholes allowing seizures in violation of WTO rules while its own firms are among the loudest advocates pushing for enforcement of WTO standards in India should serve as an embarrassment. The EU has work to do putting its own house right before turning its attention elsewhere. And the hypocrisy doesn’t stop there. Swiss pharma giants such as Novartis are quick to push for seizures of generic drugs, conveniently forgetting that Switzerland’s strong pharmaceutical industry is itself the result of past protectionism and disregard for IP rights. India has every right to challenge EU efforts to prevent it from protecting its emergent industries the way European nations have done in the past. Even today, Europe persists with hugely controversial agricultural subsidies while simultaneously condemning protectionism in the world’s emerging economies.
The current dispute also goes beyond relations between India and the EU. Brazil simultaneously filed a WTO complaint over the seized shipments, both because it was to receive some of the seized meds and because it’s nascent pharmaceutical industry faces the same IP issues as India’s. Public health advocates see this as an ongoing battle to ensure affordable access to medication for the world’s poor. Slick marketing aside, big-pharma has done shamefully little to ensure its products get to those who most need them. Recent efforts to confuse the issues of counterfeit medication and generic drug manufacture ahead of important global summits addressing counterfeiting are the latest addition to that particular list of shame. Granted, counterfeit medication is a major problem for which India bears some blame, but the issue has nothing to do with legitimate companies producing high quality generic drugs. Still, pharmaceutical multinationals continue to conflate counterfeiting and patent issues in order to cloak IP concerns in the rhetoric of public good.
As for the WTO dispute itself, the EU now has two months to open consultations with India and Brazil to search for a mutually agreed settlement, barring which India and Brazil can convey a WTO panel to rule on alleged EU violations, a long and involved process that will drag on for at least a year. Seeing as how India has already rejected the EU’s first proposals at regulatory reform, the issue seems set to make many more headlines.
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Additional background and reading:
http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/india-brazil-drag-eu-to-wto/394686/
Feb
07
2010
Babu meets the Dada.
Dada: Babu, timi dat kaile dekhaudainau ni. kina? (show me your teeth, babe)
Babu: I firmly see Marx’s dream before me – shooting people in the morning, carrying out surgery in the day, and becoming a hero in the evening. Does it look like I have time to brush my god damn teeth and choose between the capitalistic forces of colgate and closeup versus the imperialistic tendencies of Dabur Lal Dunta Manjan?
Dada: I thought I was the Dada. But hats off to you, you know how to kick start an interview. How do you do it?
Babu: How do I do what?
Dada: How do you do that?
Babu: What that?
Dada: that.
Babu: This is getting no where.
Dada: You think so?
Babu: Am used to it.
Dada: Ok, moving on, your party is called Maoists, what does this mean?
Babu: We are Mao’s decendents from an illegitimate affair he had with a Nepali princess.
Dada: Do communists like wai wai?
Babu: You see, this is the fundamental problem with life in Nepal. The capitalist pigs are able to feed the pigs wai wai before we can brainwash them with ideals. Wai wai tastes better and fills you up. It can be prepared in many ways – can be eaten raw, on the fly, or cooked as a proper meal… but they are reductionists – their package is smaller than what it once was.
Dada: Thank you Babu for taking part in the first interview of the Nepali Dada Party as it awaits the moment to revolutionize the revolutionaries with a counter-revolution to meet the other-revolution. Dhanya ho babu, dhanya ho!
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