Adil Najam

I am still in the groove of Arif Lohar’s Coke Studio performance. I find it especially invigorating to listen to Arif’s version back to back with his father Alam Lohar’s. In doing that, I just stumbled on this wonderful recording from Alam Lohar: England (read, Englaaand) di Jugi. It really is worth a listen.

Adil Najam

Pakistan seems ready to ban the Internet (again) (well, parts of it)!

On the face of it, this is Internet banning silly season all over again. But wait. Maybe, this is different. Maybe, its not even a bad thing! Maybe, this is exactly what we need!

But before I explain why this may be so, here are the essential facts. The machinations of banning the Internet in Pakistan are not new. It has sometimes been done to silence political speech (and here), but its more common and certainly its recent incarnation is in the name of religion. Of course, the frenzy was at its height recently with the ‘Facebook ban.’ Now it seems that the Lahore High Court has ordered the banning of an entire range of websites, possibly including Google, Yahoo, MSN and Bing. Supposedly, the government’s position is that “no website will be blocked without investigation,” but also that websites will be blocked to comply with the court’s rulings.

Adil Najam

Famous Chicago mobster Al Capone was nabbed not for his greatest sins but for tax evasion. U.S. President Richard Nixon was eventually removed from office because a minor political burglary at a Democratic Party office at the Watergate building led to a national conversation that unearthed far more disturbing trends in Nixon’s attitude towards governance, and his own respect for the law.

The issue of ‘fake degrees’ may be on its way to become Pakistan’s equivalent of a similar tendency: an offense than many Pakistanis would consider relatively “small” in light of larger abuses of the law that they see everyday, is being used by society – and now by the Supreme Court – as a means to expose and punish a deep-rooted tendency amongst those who seek and claim power to lie to and cheat those who they are meant to serve.

If it is indeed so – and one hopes it is – then that is a good thing. We at ATP have been clear and consistent in our stand on abuse of education – whether it is via plagiarism, via abuse of rules, or via fake degrees. There are those who argue that these are minor offenses in comparison to many others. They may be so. But they are also symptomatic of a larger rot – lying, and lying unashamedly, often to the very people one is supposed to serve. If this is a way that some examples can be set and that a larger message can be sent that such lying will not be tolerated, then we say it is a good thing. In its decision today, the Supreme Court of Pakistan and Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry seems to think the same.