If nothing else brings us together, Pakistan and India, at least our misfortunes should. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistanis a private body not a government ‘one as ours is. Its annual report, preceded sometimes by an interim one, is a very well written document through which the wind of liberalism and compassion blows strong and steady. Maybe this is because its editor, Aziz Siddiqui, and the Director of its head office (in Lahore), my friend the distinguished journalist I.A. Rehman, are good penmen. Reading through it one cannot but be sad at the tribulations of the people, but no self-gratification is possible for on almost very count the Indian situation is similar. Violent crimes against women, for instance, In Pakistan there is a rape every three hours and every other person raped’ is a minor,

There are 50,000 cases pending before the Lahore High Court alone. The Supreme Court’s human rights benches are mostly in active, Many of posts in the higher judiciary are unfilled. Mr Saroop ‘Chand was served with a notice to vacate his ancestral home in Rawalpindi within seven days because the Cantonment would not renew his lease. The report quotes Mr Saroop Chand as saying: “We (Hindus) have no choice but to kill Our-selves”, The Supreme Court in 1993 up held the Ordinance of 1984 which had been the base for the prosecution against Ahmadias, excommunicated from Islam. Today they are unable to use the salutation Assalam o Alaikum, Insha Allah or Mashallah. There have been physical attacks against them in universities and colleges and there are about 100 Ahmadias in jail for the ant blasphemy law. In Baluchistan the Jamaat ul Islam is trying to have the same sort of excommunication declared against the Zikris. Familiar to us, there is a death by stove burning every other day but no investigation has got to the bottom of them. Relevant to us in Delhi with its spurt in child kidnappings, Pakistan experienced 400 kidnappings a month in Punjab alone. The state of children is going from bad to worse: there are at least 50,000 wasting children who would not live to be 12 years of age because they were bonded,

Sentences of amputation of right hand and left foot were declared on two people by a special court of Bahawalpur. The District and Sessions Judge of D.I. Khansentenced a woman to death by stoning but it is not clear whether the sentences ‘were carried’ out. Higher courts have, on the whole, stayed the implementation of such horrendous sentences, In all that we read in the report do we not see a reflection of our own face in the mirror? Yet another common image: the gender gap in literacy is rising and so is the dis parity among men and women in employment opportunities and the mortality of girls. One optimistic Statement in the report is that political harassment has declined. What impressed me about the British Government’s very new report The Future of the BBC was that all was said in 51 lucid pages. ‘The other virtue was the effort to think ahead, visualize what things will be like in the future and pre pare for them, Obviously, the future in multimedia in the world will be highly competitive and so the report spends quite a bit of ‘Space on commercial aspects. But it was important to make the point several times over that the BBC remains a public service broad casting organization, certainly as far as the United Kingdom is concerned, to make good programmers, the best possible, with the money from the license fee, in other words. Public money: This is so very different from our lurching along with no policy whatever, producing report after internal bureaucratic report and not really having any but a blurred concept of the future or of the ways to meet it fair and square, For the BBC the commercial side is “the music of the future” for at the moment it only amounts to 300 million pounds, about what the BBC spends on its programmers on the arts. ‘What permeates the report is a justified pride in World Service Radio with its 130 million listeners and hopes of success for World Service TV, still in its infancy. ‘The Foreign and Commonwealth Office will no longer call the shots even about the foreign languages in which to broadcast or the time lengths. The last vestiges of government control or direction are being taken away. This seems a 180 degree tum from the Thatcher years when the funds for the BBC’s World Service were sought to be cut every so often.

Article extracted from this publication >>  December 2, 1994