KARACHI, Aug 25: The Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority has no business to decide what TV channels the people of the country should watch.

This is what a lot of cable TV subscribers that Dawn spoke to on Monday said.

They criticized Pemra for banning Urdu-language Indian channels, some of which are immensely popular.

Hasan Ahmed, a student, said Pemra had no moral justification for the ban on Indian channels. “When we make monthly payments to cable operators, we should be allowed to watch whatever entertainment channels we want to see. Pemra has no right to tell us whether a channel is good for our morals or not,” he said.

Salma Khan, a marketing executive, said Pemra had not been consistent about the justification for the ban on Indian channels. “A couple of months back, the regulatory authority imposed a ban on Indian channels citing heightened tension between India and Pakistan. It also drew our attention to the fact that Pakistani channels had been banned by the Indian government.

“Then the regulatory authority came up with another excuse. It said that because cable TV channels are watched by families, there should be some sort of monitoring so that objectionable material is not allowed to find its way to households.

“When this excuse began to become ineffective, the regulatory authority came up with another excuse. It is now saying that Indian channels should not be allowed to be viewed in Pakistan so that the domestic TV industry thrives without hindrance.”

Ms Khan said the fact that the regulatory authority changed its stand so many times made the ban dubious. She added that Pemra seemed to be backing well-heeled media tycoons who operated TV channels in the country unmindful of the priorities of hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

A cable operator, who did not wish to be named, recalled that last year the government had also taken action against those cable operators who had been showing Indian channels and movies on their networks. He added that quite a few cable operators had been arrested by the police under the Maintenance of Public Order Ordinance.

The cable operator complained that whenever the government initiated such a clamp-down, police officials upped their bribe rates. “Previously we were paying the police a certain amount of money on a monthly basis. Now the police want more because they know they can detain us and seize our equipment. They know very well that we run Indian movies and channels because we give connections to police stations as well,” said the cable operator.

The cable operator said that because of the ban on Indian channels, it had become extremely difficult for them to get thesubscribers to pay their monthly dues. “Brawls broke out in many low-income localities where people actually roughed up some cable operators for not relaying the channels of their choice. We had a hard time explaining to people that the ban had been imposed by Pemra and not by us,” he said.

He pointed out that ever since the imposition of the ban on Indian channels, the sale of decoders and dish antennas had gone up.