Jawed Naqvi

We have to assess the role if any the media can play to demilitarise our societies. –Source: outlookindia
Between October and February Delhi is at its hospitable best. The city’s cultural season kicks off with music concerts, plays and symposiums.

The ustads and the pandits of classical music settled abroad flee the harsh European and American winters (and now recession too), foreign diplomats arrive in droves just like their Indian counterparts escape Delhi’s summer heat for assignments in cooler climes citing urgent matters of state. All manner of international conferences spring up like winter plants around this time of the year. The same holds true for India-Pakistan peaceniks. They too come to life in Delhi’s nippy air. For this reason they may be referred to as fair weather friends. Of course there are the perennials, the all-season peacewallahs, who never take a break. In fact, some highly respected Pakistani intellectuals arrive in Delhi so often it makes one wonder why they need to go home at all.

Peace conferences are linked to budgets that are linked to NGOs whose sources of funding were they to be unravelled, would reveal a delicious guide to the inner workings and underhand jockeying in the world of international diplomacy. And yet, it seems an unwritten code that these touchy-feely friendship summits should not spill out of conference rooms into places where they could be really effective.

(I did not for example, see any of the familiar ‘conferences’ on the streets of Delhi when an unreported, un-televised and unsupervised group of several thousand angry villagers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh had thronged the Indian capital to make it the biggest rally yet in the aftermath of the Mumbai terror attack. Their demand: peace talks with Pakistan as opposed to the beating of war drums by India.)

But now, in the run-up to a major ‘peoples’ peace conference scheduled later this month, we have two important media outfits, one each from India and Pakistan, prescribing peace as the way forward between the two countries. It’s an interesting move, given that it was the jingoistical media in both countries baying for war not so long ago.

The trouble with peace talks when they are not being held between representatives of states is that they usually count for nothing.

An implicit understanding in conferences thus held is that only those who are willing to abide by a set of unwritten rules get invited. Good behaviour is of utmost importance. The system takes charge even here. The visa officers in Islamabad and New Delhi still remain the final arbiter of what the subject of any discussion is likely to be.

Never can an Indian with a keen interest in the plight of the Dalits of Pakistan or the alienation of Baloch tribespeople from their natural resources be given a visa by the Pakistani high commission in Delhi. Similarly a Pakistani with keen interest in the Indian military’s plans to invade the country’s mineral-rich heartland while pretending to weed out Maoist guerrillas or with some genuine concern for what is happening in Kashmir will most likely be put on the black list at the Indian mission in Islamabad.

In other words, the peace missionaries have to twist themselves into a difficult yoga asana in which while they weakly question their own country’s government they must accept the ‘other’ government’s position unquestioningly.

Similarly, one of the problems with Track II kind of talks is their elitism. Their point of reference is the clichéd Hindu-Muslim unity or India-Pakistan unity or similarly maudlin equations. They do not and will not address the more urgent issues that in the first place have led to a bad political and military situation in the entire neighbourhood of South Asia – that is the rightwing political consolidation in both countries.

The question that really needs to be asked is: What is the nature of the state in India and Pakistan? Do their actions match their rhetoric?

Notice how both states define terror as their prime threat, the definition of which was bodily lifted from the Bush White House. After all, the definition of terror under the Reagan presidency was different. Then Daniel Ortega was the world’s biggest terrorist and Iran’s mullahs were secret US allies in the war against the Salvadorian government.

The Americans have dropped the term “war on terror” but the media in India and Pakistan continues to flaunt it like an expired label on old food. In other words, both in India and in Pakistan the middle ground that once opposed rightist governments and their foreign patrons has shrunk, even disappeared. The accepted choice in Pakistan is tragically limited – that you either join the extremists to push out the Americans, or you link up with the Americans to exterminate the extremists. As the desperation grows, fewer and fewer seem to be able to see that America’s actions are actually manufacturing religious zealots. The drone attacks, rather than exterminating ‘terrorists’ are sowing the proverbial dragon’s teeth from which more and more spring, like whole armies, trained and ready for combat.

In India, for a different set of reasons, the government, even without being in danger of being overrun by the Taliban, is doing everything in its power to ingratiate itself with the US. And now, in the name of fighting ‘Maoists,’ India too is racing towards joining Pakistan to become a militarised police state. Last week’s papers once again reported how tens of thousands of paramilitary troops are being deployed in India’s tribal heartland.

Unless the professional peaceniks can address these issues, genuine issues of justice and injustice, not just convenient and elitist ones which allow them to float in and out of each others’ countries in good weather, wining and dining each other and shopping for ethnic memorabilia to put on their walls and coffee tables, it could be said that they use up more oxygen than they ought to.

In this context, we have to assess the role if any the media can play to demilitarise our societies, particularly given the Murdochian hold that exists on its cloned worldview. The mess that jingoistic newspapers and TV channels have created in both countries is largely responsible for the dissemination of distorted and negative images of each other, which have struck roots among the more gullible minds.

The damage the Murdochian media continues to do within the confines of their national boundaries is even worse than the foul image they create of those across the borders. It is this that begs urgent attention and repair. An agreeable Delhi season is as good a time as any to begin the task in earnest even if the chances are that a Murdochian ploy will once again try to subvert the initiative as it has done so often in the past.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com