Covering events is usually amongst the simplest of news stories to construct. There’s a formula to it, ie the article must contain details about who did what where, and why. Who was present and who was conspicuous by his absence, what the gist of the conversations was, whether or not the event was well organised and whether the atmosphere was pleasing. In essence, that is all there is to it and one can enjoy the event with the certain knowledge that the story will not take too long to write.

But when I was recently called upon to cover an event in connection with the Jammu and Kashmir dispute, I was rather taken aback to find that writing the subsequent article proved complicated. Every sentence I wrote, each phrase I used, the images I tried to capture, all echoed the terrible PTV and Pak Studies textbook clichés that one has been force-fed for decades. I found myself typing hideosities such as “the festering wound that is Kashmir,” “unspeakable Indian atrocities” and “the brave jawans fighting for their freedom.” I found that I’d thoughtlessly divided the area into “Azad Kashmir” and “Indian-held Kashmir”, and perhaps worst of all, I’d written sentences presenting the assumption that the area’s population is comprised solely of Muslims.

What disturbed me was not whether the Indian security forces in the area have proved benevolent – which they haven’t, by any yardstick – but that the propaganda sneaked up unbidden from the recesses of my mind, where it had clearly been lodged for years.

Eventually, after much re-writing and, in fact, re-visiting of my own assumptions, I did manage to produce something that I wasn’t embarrassed to have published under my name. But that is not the point of this story. The point is what the experience said about the manner in which we are indoctrinated by the mediums through which we access knowledge. The point is that it took active care and concentration to separate fact from propaganda, to come up with my own metaphors on the subject and suppress the words put into the back of my mind, and therefore my mouth, by the state.

Talk to the educated in Pakistan and most will agree that the propaganda machine is quite laughably transparent, and that they are more or less immune because they can see through it. Most of us consider ourselves capable of thinking through the ideologies that have consistently been disseminated by the state for the past 60 odd years – Pakistan’s romance with sajeelay jawans, the sohni dharti and Pakistan ka matlab kya slogans. The farmer ennobled by poverty, toiling away in his mustard field, the dupatta-clad young woman teaching sums to a group of scrubbed-clean and shyly smiling village children sitting on taats, the middle-class matron praying for the continuing safety and prosperity of her husband and sons. These images are as familiar as the sound of the azaan, the sun or the sky, and therein lies their power.

It is sobering to realise that even as we ridicule the state propaganda machine for being simple, the tactics it employs are insidiously effective and far from ham-handed. Proof of this is in ample evidence: the urge to stand up when the national anthem is played before the film starts the cinema, the inability to exclude a war scene while filming anything even remotely concerned with patriotism, the automatic reference to the Quaid instead of Jinnah, the unquestioned assumption that the presidency can only be occupied by a Muslim.

The fact is that through the simple device of flooding a citizenry with layers of related meanings, all of them reinforcing the same ideologies, the entity that is Pakistan has managed to instil within most of us a set of assumptions that have been hammered in to the point of feeling entirely natural. Thus it is that in any discussion on Jammu and Kashmir, no matter what the level of awareness and education of the participants, you will always find somewhere the assumption that the area ‘belongs’ to ‘us’, and that to hold any other stance is to be daringly left-wing and intellectual. The assumption may justified by hard-nosed and practical arguments, such as water or strategic importance, but even so it is underpinned by the ‘hamara Kashmir’ romance that all born and bred Pakistanis have grown up with.

For another illustration of the power of media-managed indoctrination, consider the strength of the propaganda machine run by American empire and the Bushisms that have penetrated virtually every discourse. ‘Striking deep into the heart of terror’, ‘flushing the terrorists out’ – an analogy that draws upon exterminating vermin – and other such images and phrases are now used indiscriminately across the world’s media, even by organisations of nations and people that have been labelled terrorists by the American empire. In Pakistan, for example, statements by politicians or the ISPR, the newspapers and the television channels, are replete with metaphors and analogies that were popularised by the ‘war against terror’ mafia. In adopting the language, we have also internalised the propaganda.

The aggressor making such attempts towards indoctrination can be understood — but it has to be asked why the victims are speaking the same language.

— hmumtaz@dawn.com