Dissent has been the most cherished human ideal throughout the course of human history and all the revolutions, religions and invention trace their roots to the same ideal. Like the prophetic dictum of Rousseau that “Man is born free, but in chains everywhere,” however, the tyranny has always been on the march to hush the dissenting voices.

Similarly, Pakistan is also gradually following in the footsteps of China in censorship and it seems that the government thinks it necessary to gag any outlet of free thought and deploy every citizen with thought police.

An editorial published in the leading English daily ‘The News’ on January 17 pointed out to the blocking of weblogs maintained by the students supporting the ongoing struggle for the restoration of judiciary and lawyers movement by the Pakistan Telecommunication Corporation (PTCL) which has been done under a new law introduced recently to control the cyberspace. The editorial says that the government has also banned the websites supporting Sindhi and Baloch nationalists in the past. It had also imposed a blanket ban on millions of blogs using the popular blogging site Blogger on the directives of the Supreme Court during the cartoon episode which continued for a long time.

The regime had adopted an easy way to fight the problems, which are essentially byproducts of its wrong policies by banning the opinion and dissent. The government removed the chief justice of Pakistan in wrongful manner and when he resisted the move-which was rare a occasion in our history so the nation supported him and government mistook this as a fault of the media and banned the live coverage.

On November 3, 2007 after the imposition of the emergency in the country Musharraf under the guidance of his half-witted advisors again ambushed the judiciary, constitution, media and the other remaining institutions and went on complete blackout of the media. The chronicler of press freedom Zamir Niazi has lamented the same situation when he writes that, “Without any kind of credibility whatsoever, with a muzzled press, emasculated judiciary and inefficient legislature, the country has gone through crises, tragedies, turmoil and ultimately the 1997 trauma of dismemberment.”

Clearly the government motives were not to solve the problems it was facing then but it was an Ostrich like behavior and it does not want to let people know what was happening in the country. Now the Geo is banned for more than two and half months and the rest of the channels have to toe the line, any significant drop in the number of terror incidents is in sight?

Albert Camus perhaps said for such occasions that, “Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into a liar than into a man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object,”

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