Daily ‘Pakistan’ (26 September 2003) did a survey of distinguished opinion on the question of allowing Indian entertainment on Pakistani cable TV. Hafiz Idris of Jamaat e-Islami said that Indian and Pakistani cultures were different.
Indian culture was ‘madar-pidar azad’ (an insulting way of saying liberated) and could not be shown in Pakistan. But he accused the government of double standards because Western obscenity was acceptable while Indian obscenity was not. He said if Pakistan had adopted its real culture today people would not have minded the banning of Indian channels.
| "I mean, what entertainment do people need, besides regular readings of the Koran?" |
Allama Javed Ahmad Ghamidi on the other hand opposed the ban on Indian entertainment and said that only positive state action was good for the people. He favoured nurturing moral values till they became so strong that it would be safe for the people to see any kind of entertainment without being corrupted.
| "Yar! We be Islamists! We be tough! Bring on them titties! We can take it!" |
Pakistan has tilted dangerously once again into the debate over what is obscenity and no good will come out of it. The debate requires an intellectual gift we don’t have
| It's called a sense of humor... |
and any slightly sophisticated argument will either be rejected out of hand or go over the heads of a society that feels proud of being ideological and brainless. A miserable thing called PEMRA has banned Indian entertainment from cable TV and is going around arresting the offending cable operators while it allows the same kind of entertainment from Western channels. To make it logical it might have to ban Western channels too.
No one can describe obscenity and define its limits. That’s reason enough to move headlong into insanity. According to ’Jang’ (10 September 2003), film stars Madiha Shah and Shazadi were arrested in Lahore after the district judge vacated their bail. They were accused of obscenity while dancing in a local theatre allowed by the state. Both started crying and said they were not involved in obscenity but some people were harassing them. They were bailed out by another judge the same day. According to ‘Jang’, the wave of strict law was further strengthened in Gujranwala when the local district judge ordered the closure of four drama theatres in Gujranwala for not following the scripts earlier submitted to the government. The theatres were closed under charges of obscenity. On October 2, a sessions judge in Gujranwala compelled the theatres to close down suddenly with audiences fleeing in all directions when he caused policemen from three police stations to attack a theatre to arrest two actresses, Hina Shaheen and Salomi, on charges of obscenity. According to ‘Nawa-e-Waqt’, 30 stick-wielding hooligans attacked four hotels in Qissa Khani Bazar in Peshawar and accused the managers of showing obscene cable TV. After that they broke down the hotels and beat up the management. The hotels registered cases against the Pasban organisation of the Jamaat e-Islami for vandalism but the chief of Pasban, Masaib Gul said that no Pasban member was involved in the crime.
| "Nope. Wudn't us. Musta been somebody else..." |
Everyone seems helpless in the face of this barbarity. The lower courts, overloaded with backlogs of cases, spend a lot of time hearing obscenity cases trying to understand the mind of the offended person. Almost anything, when framed against the norms of modesty found in the various sources of religious piety, becomes obscene. At the higher judiciary there is an awareness of what is happening but the Talibanisation of the lower courts can’t be stopped. The pattern of the comic opera goes like this. A crazy man goes to court saying just anything. (Maybe he is not crazy; he wants to settle out of court and become rich.) He can say Wasim Akram the cricketer appeared in an Indian ad that was against the ideology of Pakistan. He can say our women’s hockey team is obscene. Even the Council of Islamic Ideology at times participates in this charade.
Getting riled over obscenity, most of us forget that we have gone through it all earlier. Dr Israr Ahmad once outlawed Imran Khan because he used to rub the ball provocatively on his thigh. Our official TV channels went crazy doing censorship on cartoons, and husband-and-wife actors were declared divorced when they acted in plays showing divorce. PTV is famous for censoring English feature films till nothing was left of the story because portions representing indecent exposure, kissing between adults and children, between parents and children involving a grown-up girl, had to be axed. Kissing on the cheek was also disallowed as that too aroused the Muslim masses sexually. And this kissing included kisses bestowed affectionately by a man on his wife or daughter or sister. The idea was that sons and father and brothers should not indulge in this incestuous activity as that would encourage incest in society. Even nature movies were censored. The idea was to block from public all scenes of love-making among the animals as that would arouse the Paki population sexually. Here excitation was supposed to work through suggestion. If an ant was mounting another ant, the viewer was supposed to possess the imagination to ‘substitute’ the two with human beings and then proceed to get sexually aroused. In one programme two male zebras were mounting each other out of mischief. This scene was blocked by a screen although there was no sexual activity going on. But the censor person was right in thinking that the scene would be subjected to imaginative ‘substitution’ by the human viewer who will then proceed to get homosexually aroused. Since the ‘animal world’ programmes are full of scenes explaining the reproductive functions among ants, jelly fish, whales and giraffes, etc, TV could not possibly keep track of all the scenes of sexual arousal. It had therefore made the wise decision not to show all the programmes. |