CLOSE to the private residence of Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) Prime Minister Raja Farooq Haider in the main city of old Muzaffarabad is an establishment that has witnessed a stupendous past. This is the Azad Kashmir Radio Muzaffarabad (AKRM). Once touted as the voice of Kashmiris struggling for freedom, it now mourns the apathy of the authorities in Islamabad and Muzaffarabad.

“This station has played a tremendous role in not only advocating the noble cause, but also in promoting the arts,” says Faisal Jamil Kashmiri, as I bump into him at the entrance of AKRM on Thursday. Kashmiri’s father was a staff member on the programmes side, and he himself was a broadcaster during his teens, some 20 years ago. “But now it appears to be smitten with indifference,” he muses.

Inside, I learn, a two-member technical team is installing a new FM transmitter. The station’s transmission has remained suspended for the past five days due to the breakdown of the earlier worn-out FM transmitter.

The lustre of AKRM’s achievements dates to the ’60s. The station was launched on Oct 15, 1960 by the government of Pakistan to “kindle the passion for freedom of the Kashmiris on both sides of Line of Control on the one hand and counter Indian propaganda against their just cause on the other”. The inauguration was performed by then AJK president K. H. Khurshid, a patron of the performing arts and a towering leader of freedom struggle.

Initially, transmissions were made through a one-kilowatt (kW) shortwave transmitter. In the mid-1970s, a 10-kW medium-wave transmitter was also installed, which was in 1983 replaced by a 150-kW high-power transmitter.

Back then, AKRM was home to highly committed broadcasters, artists and men of letters, recalls former programme manager Raja Khalid Muzaffar. He joined radio as a producer in 1963 and has been enjoying retired life in Muzaffarabad since 1994. Muzaffar, who also wrote scripts for two years for the ‘Voice of Kashmir’, an English-language programme by AKRM, claims that radio stations in Srinagar and Jammu in India-held Kashmir had to come up with special programmes to outdo AKRM.

Rafique Mir, a former employee, recalls that AKRM used to hold literary gatherings and poetry contests regularly, with guests from across Pakistan. Concerts were also a regular feature, with singers such as Mehdi Hassan and Iqbal Bano. The station had its own 20-member orchestra.

Altaf Andrabi, who migrated from Srinagar to Muzaffarabad in the late ’80s, tells me that across the divide he too was among the avid listeners of AKRM. “The programmes in Urdu, Kashmiri, Pahari and Gojri were very popular in most parts of India-held Kashmir,” he says. After migrating, Andrabi became a member of the AKRM team. In 1990, AKRM started a talk show, ‘Hamari Awaz’, with Andrabi and the late Qamar Awan.

Listeners would clear their schedule for this programme, which was a blend of conversation between the two characters on the atrocities committed by Indian troops, and resistance songs. It was in those days that the governor of India-held Kashmir was quoted as saying that these songs could motivate even the dead to rise up. Andrabi says the station would receive dozens of letters every day, even from across the LoC.

But the Oct 8, 2005 earthquake brought transmissions to a halt. On Oct 28, 2005, transmission resumed after the installation of an FM transmitter under a “provisional” arrangement. More than 11 years on, that status remains unchanged.

From October 2005 to December 2014, a skeleton staff ran transmission from flimsy tents and shelters, braving the scorching summer heat and the biting winter cold. In December 2014, the technical block in the main broadcasting centre was superficially renovated. But the administrative staff and news sections still operate from shelters.

At the ‘inauguration’ of the technical block, the then PBC director general Samina Ahmed announced that a 100-kW medium-wave digital transmitter would be installed at AKRM by June 2015. The commitment has not yet materialised. The staff alleges that on two occasions, 100-kW digital transmitters purchased for AKRM were sent to the Multan and Larkana radio stations. “Since October 2005, this station has only rundown FM transmitters that have very little reception,” says an employee who requests anonymity. Another headache is the unavailability of a powerful generator, resulting in the suspension of daily transmissions during loadshedding hours.

AKRM station director Rashid Ahmad Khan says: “We are running current affairs and other programmes during transmission from 6:45am to 11pm, with a midday break of 75 minutes, but the audience has shrunk. Drama and music production have been suspended due to the weak transmission mechanism.”

Khan asserts that the PBC headquarters are regularly reminded about the problem. “I have even written [asking] for the installation of a 300-kW medium-wave transmitter so that our transmissions are heard in Jammu and Kashmir, and even beyond in New Delhi,” he says. “But it’s not just the information ministry that can get it done. Since it involves finances, the planning commission and the finance division are also major contributors [to the problem].”

Published in Dawn, February 26th, 2017