Enemy Images on Pakistan Television
By I.A.Rehman
Pakistan
television reminds viewers of their enemy every day.
For years now its main news bulletin has been
presenting, prominently in the first half of the programme, an account of this
enemy’s atrocities in the Muslim-majority part of Kashmir valley. The story may
include the latest acts of barbarism by Indian troops against the militant
guerrillas or innocent civilians, or protest strikes in towns, or restrictions
placed from time to time on dissident leaders’ basic rights to freedom of
movement and political agitation. The killer/oppressor is identified as an
enemy not merely because he is committing gross violation of human rights,
although the spoken lines does suggest this, but because he is operating as an
instrument in India’s decades-old conflict with Pakistan by perpetuating its
hold over Kashmir that, according to Pakistan, has been denied its right to
self-determination.
With
a view to facilitating public acceptance of the enemy image. Pakistan
television has been offering, besides news items, feature productions and
discussions in current affairs programmes. The features are usually enlarged
versions of news reports of the conflict in Kashmir the heroic resistance put
up by ordinary and generally resourceless Kashmiri men and women against a
merciless foe, the enormous sacrifices borne by them in the cause of freedom
and justice, and the utter inhumanity and bestiality of their oppressors. The
current affairs programmes offer a recapitulation of historyhow the partition
principle, according to which princely sates were required to join one of the
new dominions India or Pakistan in accordance with the wishes of the population
was subverted by the Maharaja of Kashmir in collusion with the Indian rulers’
how the United Nations Security Council’s resolutions calling for a plebiscite
in the disputed territory were frustrated by Indian obduracy, how important for
peace in the region the resolution of the Kashmir problem is, and how
impossible and immoral it would be for Pakistan to give up the cause of the
Kashmiri people.
The
issue is placed in a wider historical context. India has resorted to carnage
and pillage in Kashmir, it is argued, because it has not reconciled to the
creation of Pakistan. Its Kashmir policy is therefore part of its plans to undo
Pakistan. Thus, Pakistan is confronting an entity whose hostility is not
confined to the dispute over Kashmir, but one whose enmity to Pakistan is more
deeply rooted. Since India’s non-acceptance of the reality of Pakistan is on
account of its repudiation of the theoretical foundations of Pakistan, it is an
enemy in an ideological sense as well as in physical terms. Thus unless India
agrees to give up Kashmir and offers proof that it has reconciled to Pakistan’s
existence as a free state, it will continue to be rated as a standing enemy.
However,
this enemy image is not the products of Pakistan television alone, which came
into being 17 years after independence. Pakistan people’s thought-processes had
already been fixed by a long history of communal confrontation in the
sub-continent, the orgy of violence which attended the partition, and the
impressions formed by the literature of the colonial period and the under-developed
Press before independence and the controlled one afterwards.
In order to fully appreciate Pakistan television’s performance in creating enemy images it is necessary to briefly review the development of the country’s media. Pakistan had a fledging Press at the time of independence. A low literacy rate impeded its growth. Even today the combined circulation of newpapers is around two million copies in a population estimated at 140 million. A better part of the Press chose to accept between 1947 and 1958 the official version of Pakistan’s disputes with India. Mainly because it formed a continuation of the communal controversy that preceded independence and in the course which the masses has imbibed a certain view of the politics.