Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [135]
It would be a grave mistake, however, to laugh at the waderos of Sindh. As the chapter on Sindh will demonstrate, they are very much in control of their own society, and look like remaining so for the foreseeable future. The secret of their success is a mixture of wealth and the deference ensured by their status as clan chiefs, local hereditary religious figures, or a mixture of the two. One local landowner we visited seemed barely above the level of the larger peasants in terms of wealth, living in a bleak concrete house with bare concrete walls and floors; yet he turned out to be a pir, and a significant political influence in the local Shia community.
THE MEDIA
In the twenty years between my stay in Pakistan in the late 1980s and the writing of this book, by far the most important change on the Pakistani political scene (other than the rebellion of the Pakistani Taleban) has been the proliferation of television and radio stations during Musharraf’s period in power. By 2009 there were around eighty Pakistani TV channels, twelve exclusively for news and current affairs. Indeed, several middle-class people said to me that ‘news has become our entertainment’, though they admitted that this was probably the effect of novelty and would sooner or later wear off. Five channels were devoted to religion.
In the 1980s, Pakistani television was completely state-controlled and was of a quite excruciating dullness (as indeed was state TV in India). Newspapers and magazines were the main sources of news and analysis, but, although they had occasional lively discussions and sometimes exposed scandals, their journalists were hopeless at following up and researching stories.
Musharraf had good cause to curse the media he had allowed to form. In the later years of his rule it was above all due to the support of some of these channels – notably Geo, a branch of the Jang media group – that the Lawyers’ Movement gathered public support and even briefly became something like a mass movement. This alliance of journalists and lawyers gave many people the idea that a new middle-class political force that might transform the political system had been forged in Pakistan; or, at the very least, that the media would play a critical role in making and breaking governments, reducing the traditional role of kinship and patronage.
In 2008 – 9, however, liberal intellectuals and their English-language media outlets (like the Friday Times and Daily Times of Lahore) turned against much of the rest of the new media, accusing them of sympathy for the Taleban and bias against the PPP administration of President Zardari. There was much muttering among liberals of my acquaintance about establishment conspiracies to manipulate the media, and about the way in which Musharraf had created a ‘Frankenstein’s Monster’.
The error of the liberals and many Western analysts was to forget that, in the words of Dr Mosharraf Zaidi, ‘Pakistan’s media is guilty of being a microcosm of the society that it reports on, reports for and reports to. It is a reflection and an extension of Pakistan at large.’19 Liberals had assumed that a new media, dominated by educated middle-class people, would inevitably therefore reflect liberal and (by implication) pro-PPP and pro-Western positions.
This ignored the fact that a very considerable portion of the educated middle class is conservative and even Islamist by sympathy; as noted in the chapter on religion, the Jamaat Islami has long had a determined and rather successful strategy of targeting universities, partly precisely in order later to get its students into influential professions like the media. As Imran Aslam, head of Geo, told me:
When in the ’90s I started The News as Pakistan’s first desktop publication, my print media colleagues and I didn’t have a clue