Pakistan Bans Blogspot

You’re not going to believe this.

Or maybe you will. Those of us who have grown up in Pakistan, particularly during the Zia years, may well have a conditioned response to such news of censorship: a sudden jolt of shock, followed immediately by ennui, depression and a desire to move to Guam.

Blog*Spot has been banned in Pakistan.

According to BBCUrdu.com, the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) has instructed all internet service providers to block twelve websites that have republished the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. Among them is one blog on Blog*Spot. In answer to this, all major ISPs (if not all) have blocked the entire domain, blogspot.com, from Pakistan. No one in Pakistan can access any blogs on that domain.

I don’t know what appalls me more: the sheer idiocy of such a blanket ban; the horror that someone thinks they’ve just struck a blow for Islam; or this insidious thought that, in Pakistan, we have no rights, only privileges.

Truly, it’s the role of the Supreme Court I find debilitating. According to the BBC, on March 2, the Supreme Court ordered that all internet content that is insulting and degrading the beliefs of Muslims, and any site publishing the controversial caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, should be blocked from access in Pakistan. Not only that, but it has demanded that the concerned officials explain why such measures are not already in place.

Where do I put my face, as they say.

That the law in Pakistan steps into the social, the domestic and the private with all the aplomb of your stern uncle coming in to give you a right seeing-to, is something we have come to expect. Rape, blasphemy, murder, whatever – the law will explain to you why it can legislate to you on behalf of both man and God.

But I was truly hoping the internet would escape. I was truly hoping that this wasn’t going to be the UAE, where you can’t go on Orkut because it somehow offends morality. I was hoping, in all honestly, that my little world, with my little blog, would remain free and safe, for me. My four friends in Pakistan and six outside would read my blog, we’d agree or argue, and then all go back to the rest of our lives.

This was silly of me. But I wasn’t alone. Noumaan Yaqoob, whose blog was featured on BBCUrdu.com and which seems to have been what alerted the news service of the block in the first place, expressed similar views. He feels that, of all the restrictions on free speech placed in Pakistani law and society, “internet unka torr hai [the internet is their undoing]”. Here’s hoping it’s true.

Meanwhile, through RSS readers such as Bloglines.com, you can still read the articles that are posted on Blog*Spot blogs. In fact, you can actually post to your own blog in the usual manner, by logging into blogger.com, which is a domain that has not been banned. Witness the ridiculousness of that, now.

I don’t expect much of the law. In fact, I don’t expect anything, really, except that which is not good. Censorship has a great history with us. My mother was a journalist in this country for some fifteen years, and worked for The Muslim daily for most of that newspaper’s life. She remembers when Zia came into power and the paper had to go to the censors every evening. She tells me that for a while, whenever a story was censored, The Muslim would run STOP PRESS, and publish the white space. But then, after a while, when nothing looked like changing, reporters stopped reporting and writers stopped writing stories that were likely to get censored. It took the edge off, she said.

What I expect from the law is that it will take the edge off me, or try to. It will reduce all of us citizens to subjects, and in the end, the personality lording over us on a given day will become irrelevant – it will just be the Badshah Salamat of the time. And we will be left to scuttle about, scooping up whatever privilege we can, never assured of any rights.

Because Badshah Salamat isn’t a person. It’s a system. It’s a meena bazaar of power relations and negotiation, where we barter freedom for freedom, service for service, and gouge out a small tract of land in which we can be reasonably secure that we will be who we will be. And all this time, we move through life on the defensive: because we can only be reasonably sure. We can never be certain. We scrape up the privilege, here and there, to speak up, but we have no inalienable right to do so.

The Zia era remains in my mind a period of intense darkness and fear, led by Zia, but painted in the rich shades and nuances of dark by all the other actors – the censors, the police, the intelligence, the editors who gave up printing STOP PRESS, jurists, the lawyers, the ideologues who brought the law so low. The people who tried to take the edge off. And the people who gave up their edge.

Our era, our Enlightened Moderation, has its own set of criminals. The Supreme Court I now list as one of them. The internet service providers of Pakistan are another. Who else goes on the list?

Because we’re Pakistanis and we’re keeping track. Jaza saza, as Faiz Sahb said, sab yahin pe hogi.