Taimur Ahmad, 23, a resident of Samanabad, Lahore, a masters from the Punjab University, has no problem with Taseer’s murder. "His [Taseer’s] argument about the blasphemy laws was simply unacceptable," he says, adding that the "daring act of Mumtaz Qadri" should "serve as a warning to all those so-called enlightened moderates who think they can comment on Islamic issues including the sanctity of prophethood."

Taimur claims that all his friends share his views.

He thinks that the course of law is not needed to follow in cases of blasphemy. "Pakistan is a declared Islamic State and we need to send out a strong message to all blasphemers, once and for all! There is no harm in using force against them".

Even the parliament doesn’t have the authority to change these laws, he says.

Taimur admits studying at a Maulvi’s "for the past two years". "It was during this period that my concepts about Islam became clear. …My family is also very religious."

He also regards the implementation of the Islamic code of life (Sharia) as the solution to all problems.

He thinks that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, "who was otherwise not a good Muslim, may be enjoying a special place in Heaven [only] because he declared Qadianis as non-Muslims".

"Zia also did a good job when it comes to blasphemy laws". He strongly doubts the intentions of Qadianis and Shias living in Pakistan. "These two groups have been trying to strengthen themselves [in Pakistan] which is not good news."

He believes that the whole world is hatching conspiracies against Pakistan " because it is the only declared Islamic State in the world".

Hina Tarrar, 28, a resident of Model Town, Lahore, and a teacher by profesion, says: "Let’s start by declaring Qadri and all those who support Qadri as being outside the circle of Islam. Let’s see how they like being referred to as blasphemers."

Hina thinks that the problem is that the focus is on religion instead of humanism. "Why are you using Islam as a focus of debate instead of using/appealing to people’s natural, moral conscience?"

The fundamental problem, says Hina, is the interpretation of holy texts. Why are holy texts the only focus? If holy texts indeed prescribe violence or preach intolerance and people accept that, then what next? This I think is the crux of our problem. We should look into our own conscience to find the solutions."

Waseem Ali, 18, a resident of Defence, Lahore, is a student of literature and sounds angry. "People like Qadri are nothing more than blasphemers themselves for they equated love for the Holy Prophet (PBUH) and God with murder and mayhem. Haven’t they studied religion?"

Waseem believes that a solution is possible only if the Pakistanis allow themselves to be open-minded. "If you ask me whether I read the Quran cover to cover and understood everything, my answer would be NO.

"There are a lot of things I do not understand. There are a lot of things I disagree with also. There are things I may be very sentimental about. But does that mean I should go on a killing spree?"

Muhammad Aneeq, 25, a resident of Temple Road, Lahore, who owns a printing press, terms Malik Mumtaz Qadri, the murderer of Salman Taseer, as "my hero". "He did a great job. He is the Ghazi Ilm Din Shaheed of our age."

Aneeq says he never heard or read about Salmaan Taseer calling blasphemy laws as black laws, "I got to know about it through my friends. I don’t know much about [these] laws but I’ve heard that these were implemented to punish the blasphemers."

Most of his knowledge about Islam has come through the oral source, says Aneeq. "When I was a child, my parents taught me about religion. Then I started going to a mosque to read Quran and understood the religion through the eyes of our maulvi sahib," he says. "I also read books [on Islam] but they are not the primary source of my knowledge about religion.

I follow media to update myself [on different issues]."

Aneeq believes that Islam is the only religion that can guarantee success in the world and also the world hereafter. "We are Muslims, in the first place. Countries or states come later." One day the whole world will have to follow the Sharia, he beckons.

According to Aneeq, there "isn’t a single person in our vicinity who has lamented the murder [of Salmaan Taseer]. Everybody is happy!"

He reveals that his group of friends includes two engineers, a doctor, an accountant and a scientist. "All of us believe Taseer deserved it!" Period.

Fizza Aslam, 20, resident of Cantt, Lahore, works at a call centre. She says, "I don’t think killing innocent kids with drones or killing a governor are two different things. A murder is a murder.

"Want a practical solution? Preach tolerance, and start at your own house, your school and your own office. Make people understand that it’s ok to disagree, that it’s ok to have blatantly controversial perspectives on everything including religion, God, Shahid Afridi and everything in between. Arguments have always led to solutions not wars."

The script was not supposed to go like this. When the airwaves were opened up for private ownership in Pakistan in 2002, the general expectation was that the country would become more pluralistic, more tolerant. The hope was that from a national narrative scripted by a security state that has traditionally promoted paranoia for its own benefit through a tightly controlled information regime, Pakistan would make a shift from information darkness to information openness.

This, it was expected, would bring people and their welfare, as articulated by themselves rather than by the self-appointed establishment, at the centre of national policy and daily business of politics. But a confounding thing has happened: in the last eight years, a discernible shift of the mainstream broadcast media, particularly TV channels, has gone to firmly right of centre.

The events of recent weeks, leading up to the ghastly murder of a progressive public figure — Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer — in the backdrop of a media debate that has promoted extremist views, seem to indicate Pakistan’s mass media is making an eager lurch even further to the right, riding on the crest of an ideological battle that is giving disproportionate coverage to forces in the country that are extra-parliamentary and who have no mandate and no accountability.

Freer media or fear media?

Here’s the paradox: the result of eight years of independent, pluralistic media is a supposedly democratic society that is more radicalised and more violent than ever. Was there something wrong with the medium? Or wrong with the message? It would seem it is both, if the mandate was to promote a more open and tolerant society but which has turned out to be the opposite. How did it come to this?

Traditionally, the media agenda in Pakistan has been dictated by the deep state through its terrestrial monopoly over audiences via Pakistan Television and Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation until independent TV channels started sprouting in the last few years. There are now about 100 of them with a third of them being current affairs, 24/7 news channels; half of which are in vernacular languages such as Sindhi, Punjabi, Pashto, Seraiki and Balochi.

Child of the times

All these channels have been flooded by mostly unqualified and untrained journalists that make up the bulk of their reporting teams and who made the shift from Urdu language print media whose distinct characteristic has been its rightist worldview deeply coloured by religious beliefs. But then there are no formal training institutes for journalists (unlike for doctors, nurses, lawyers and bureaucrats) that could have enforced a minimum level of professionalism and ethics.

It has also not helped that the average age of a journalist in Pakistan has fallen from 47 in 2002 to about 23 now. So, paradoxically, as the media sector has aged, its practitioners have become younger and younger! And the number of journalists has also swelled from about 2,000 in 2002 to about 17,000 now. This "horde", in general, has little or no journalistic training or subject expertise and even less understanding of the concepts of balance, right to reply and contextualisation, with the result there is no depth or nuance in their reporting. The result: stereotyping at best and bias and prejudice at worst.

Political issues, religious narratives

Then there is the space for debate and dialogue offered by the dozens of talk shows on the mainstream channels. Thanks to the rise of terrorism and militancy in the last few years, conflict narrative has crowded the airwaves, in particular by the religious parties that ruled Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa as MMA and as part of the Musharraf dispensation at the Centre, as well as by other non-electoral religious groups. The latter, in particular, which include sectarian groups, have risen as the principal narrative providers on issues such as blasphemy. To keep the chatter of the talk shows going, the TV channels have come to rely heavily on the religious groups for all things religious instead of balancing out with views from the publicly mandate political classes.

The fierce business competition of ratings has done the rest to fuel radical interpretations — the channels have discernibly promoted soundbites that get them eyeballs and this has meant that even politics has been covered with the angle of religion in the last three years. Foreign policy (particular Afghanistan) and security policy (war against terrorism) has been reported with religion mixed in.

Talking without mandate

Whether it’s dealing with Afghanistan ("non-Muslim Western occupation forces there") or the war against terrorism in-country ("this is not our war", "Times Square would-be bombing by a Pakistani is a conspiracy against us", "free Aafia"), religious groups have been given disproportionate space by the media in offering interpretive narratives about the foreign and home policies.

The overall result is depressing: the mass media, in general, turns to religious groups for their soundbites disproportionate to their representation in parliament. Worse, the last few weeks show that religious groups that are not even in national or provincial parliament venting extremist views are getting equal billing with the disproportionately high microphone-time to religious that are in parliament.

Not the right write

But the mother of all media paradoxes is that most religious and sectarian groups espousing radical views getting airplay on Pakistani current affairs channels are in Punjab and Sindh that are supposedly ruled by secular (PPP, MQM) and centrist (PML-N) parties. While there are few voices overall from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (the principal war-against-terrorism theatre) on national media and almost none from Balochistan or the tribal areas, there are virtually no voices from Balochistan and KP of forces that are secular-nationalist (ANP, PPP, BNP) even though both provinces are being ruled by such forces.

The overall accumulative result, therefore, is that the mainstream TV channels — the primary source of information for most Pakistanis — are letting those groups shape the general narrative and people’s perceptions that are either not in parliament or whose representation in the legislatures is disproportionate to the airplay they get and that people voting for non-extremist parties are getting a menu of fire and brimstone.

Media-ting where undue

The problem with TV, of course, is that in the reporting realm it has to operate in the instant and you can’t plan for the instant. Hence, they go straight for the shrillest soundbites and no marks for guessing who they go to, particularly on issues of religion such as blasphemy. Take the case of Aasia Bibi-Salmaan-Taseer-Mumtaz Qadri. It was the media that helped shape this fateful troika. Since Taseer’s meeting with Aasia in jail and his consequent remarks on the blasphemy law, the media has been giving extraordinary coverage of the reaction by the religious groups.

By Qadri’s own account so far, he planned to kill Taseer in advance because the latter had termed the blasphemy law a black law. Clearly he was influenced by the views of one religious group leader/activist after another given coverage by the media. It was, arguably, the media that helped Qadri make up his mind to murder the governor by helping him have access to extremist views of representatives of different religious groups calling for punishment for Taseer. The media almost never shows, on prime time, meetings and conferences of civil society groups that take place regularly but rarely misses offering prime time coverage to conferences by religious groups, some of them fringe, including those airing declaratory edicts inciting murder and mayhem.

Shrinking space for debate

There are some prime time TV shows in the wake of Taseer’s death that are now urging restraint but why were they not doing the same when demands for death for Taseer and Sherry were being made while their opponents were being given astonishing amounts of airtime? The media has failed to educate people on the difference between blasphemy and blasphemy law.

By offering self-appointed representatives of religion as experts on contentious issues, the media has ensured that the space for rational discussion has dramatically shrunk — secular minded citizens of Pakistan are being denied space on media to either openly express their grief or offer criticism. Talk show hosts are openly inviting their fellow talk show hosts who, contrary to the basic principles of journalism of balance and of neutrality (not being part of the story), are alarmingly coming across as religious party activists themselves. Some journalists are even condoning Taseer’s murder and support incitement to murder in the name of religion and justifying Qadri’s act.

Assassination as
censorship

In short, for the liberal and secular minded in Pakistan, media has made it difficult for them to present their side of views on the subject of religion in general and blasphemy issue in particular. This is a censorship being forced by the media itself. The entire Pakistani media has failed to report that Taseer also owned a progressive media group, including a newspaper and channel and, therefore, his murder this is also an attack on media freedoms. Also, since he was killed for expressing his views, his murder is also an attack on freedom of expression.

The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion. By becoming part of the story and siding with one school of thought, the Pakistani media is contributing to radicalisation in the country. By censoring only the liberal school of thought, the Pakistani TV media is proving that censorship reflects society’s lack of confidence in itself. Assassination is the extreme form of censorship. And Taseer’s murder is not only his life that has been lost; it is also the death of the concept of agreeing to disagree.