By
Nadeem F. Paracha
Feb 15, 2015
The General Zia regime in the 1980s was most active
when it came to banning stuff.
Films, TV shows and books were regularly pulled out of
circulation because they were considered to be against the ‘Ideology of
Pakistan.’ This so-called ideology often meant the sudden whims of the current
lot of rulers.
But all that got banned by Zia almost always managed
to sneak its way into the homes of a majority of Pakistanis. And, alas, if one
thought that things in this respect would have improved with the demise of
Zia’s long moralistic charade, they had another thing coming.
Twenty years after the dictator’s demise in August
1988, the left-leaning PPP was elected by the people of Pakistan to form its
fourth government after its radical inception in 1967.
But this once populist-socialist party in its most
recent term (2008-13) actually paralleled the banning spree of its former
tormentor, Gen Zia.
It banned films, TV shows and websites at the drop of
a hat.
Pakistanis have always found ingenious and
enterprising ways of getting the banned material into the comforts of their
homes. Mainly because there is something not very right about parliamentarians,
military hunks and animated preachers with questionable ethics behaving like
self-appointed moral compasses of the nation.
If one compares the banning spree (in this context) of
the reactionary Zia dictatorship with that of the last PPP regime, one can
safely conclude that the thinking of democratic governments in Pakistan is
still held hostage by the rather suspicious and pseudo-moralistic mind-set that
was so lovingly shaped during the Zia years.
When Zia toppled the first PPP regime in 1977, his
Ministry of Information immediately banned actors, writers, journalists and
producers from state-owned media outlets who were suspected of having
sympathies with the fallen regime and/or were leftists.
Then the ministry drew up a list of TV plays and films
that were not allowed a rerun on the mini-screen. These included the serial,
Khuda Ki Basti — a 1974 TV rendition of celebrated writer Shaukat Siddiqui’s
novel of the same name that explores incidents of exploitation (by
petty-bourgeoisie capitalists) in the congested shanty towns of Karachi.
Once the regime got rid of Pakistan’s ‘immoral past,’ from the country’s big and small
screens, it then moved to rid them of
material that could put wrong ideas in people’s minds about Pakistan’s glorious
new path to ‘Islamisation.’
First to go was a TV serial written by Shoaib Hashmi
called Baleela (1979). It was a simple comedy about a slacker family that keeps
selling parts of an old car (called Baleela). The series was abruptly taken off
the air.
The censors claimed that Baleela the car was meant to
be Pakistan and the family that sold it bit by bit symbolised Zia and his merry
men. They believed Hashmi was mocking the Zia regime and alluding that it was
selling Pakistan.
The same year the dictatorship then banned director
Jamil Dehlavi’s Blood of Hussain. A surreal modern-day saga inspired by the 7th
century struggle between supporters of Imam Hussain and the Ummayad Caliph,
Yazid, this rather sloppy piece of cinema gained a cult status when its release
was banned and its director chased out of the country.
It was not that Dehlavi depicted Zia to be a contemporary
Yazid; but it was a scene in the film in which a man is shown dressing his pet
monkey in a general’s uniform that ticked the censors off. They claimed that
the film was depicting Zia to be a monkey (which it most probably was).
Blood of Hussain also became one of the first banned
movies in the country that quietly appeared in the then emerging VHS market and
made a small fortune for video rental outlets that slipped it to their
customers under the counter.
It’s a
pretentious slice of cinema that looks like an acid trip gone bad, but thanks
to its banning at the time, Dehlavi (for a bit) became the Francis Touffut of
Pakistan!
Next to go was Salman Peerzada’s Mela — a film based
on the struggle and torment of an angry young man who is inspired by ancient
Sufi saints who challenged the authorities to support the rights of the poor
people.
Again, this film too is largely amateurish in look and
studded with the most obvious clichés associated with the time’s ‘art films,’
but this didn’t stop Zia from hounding poor Peerzada out of Pakistan. Zia had a
distinct distaste for Sufism, anyway.
Among the many books banned during this period was
Stanley Wolpert’s Jinnah (1984). A biography of Pakistan’s founder, it was
taken off the racks because it radically contradicted the image of the kind of
theocratic Jinnah that the regime was busy assembling.
During the same period, PTV was running BBC’s famous
comedy series, Yes Prime Minister. The show was taken off air in 1986 when it
was felt that the clumsy prime minister in the show, his scheming bureaucrats
and bumbling cabinet looked quite like the farcical ‘democratic government’
that Zia had constructed after the 1985 ‘partyless election.’
Some columnist
somewhere in some Pakistani newspaper had alluded to this (in jest), but this
was enough for some bureaucrats to suggest (to Zia) that the show should be
banned. And it was.
All this was going on in the name of protecting the
innocent Pakistani society from deviant ideas. Yes, but all this noble moralistic
maneuvering was taking place during a time when heroin, guns, militant and
sectarian outfits and literature were actually being allowed to infuse the soul
of the same innocent society.
Let’s now very briefly see how the last PPP government
fared in this respect.
In the name of protecting the sanctity of the faith,
it off and on banned social websites like Facebook and Twitter and then blocked
YouTube.
Though quick to ban social websites, it almost did
nothing to check the continuous growth of sectarian hate literature or the kind
of violent indoctrination still taking place in a number of seminaries.
The PPP government claimed to be democratic and
liberal but in reality it seemed to be nothing more than a blundering pile of
knee-jerk actions and reactions.
Thus, it was rather hilarious when one saw the same
regime periodically become the society’s moral guide.
Not much has changed after the last regime was voted
out by the centre-right PML-N in May 2013.
Crackpots continue to come on TV and mouth off tirades
smacking of unabashed bigotry, and moulding concepts of morality in their own
mutant image; and terrorists and criminals still seem quite able to cause
scenes of carnage and mayhem — and that too after the tragic episode in which
terrorists mercilessly slaughtered students at a Peshawar school shocked the
society out of its long slumber of pathetic denial.
Though one understands that the irresponsible
silliness that takes place in certain sections of the West in the name of
freedom of speech just cannot be tolerated in sensitive Muslim societies, but
films and TV shows being banned for supposedly ‘giving Pakistan a bad name’ is
rather ridiculous.
Zero Dark Thirty (film); Homeland (TV series); Call of
Duty and Medal of Honour (video games); YouTube … Bans are not entirely wrong,
as such. They can help define certain reasonable moral and ethical boundaries
in a society. But unfortunately in Pakistan when we see — according to our
particular perceptions — two ‘evils’, we
somehow instinctively move in to curb the lesser evil while either ignoring the
bigger one or, in some cases, actually invite it to sleep in our beds.
In a democracy, it is the people who elect and reject
and make their own choices — and not self-appointed guardians of morality whose
own characters are greatly suspect.
Nadeem F. Paracha is a cultural critic and senior columnist for Dawn
Newspaper and Dawn.com
Source: http://www.dawn.com/news/1163261/an-endless-farce
URL: http://newageislam.com/islamic-ideology/nadeem-f-paracha/an-endless-farce/d/101571