WHEN will Pakistan’s new information minister, Sherry Rehman, meet the British information secretary? Perhaps never. Britain has not had one since 1946.
The French abolished the post in 1974 and if you did a Google search for Germany’s information minister, the first and possibly the only name to pop up on your computer screen would be that of Dr Paul Joseph Goebbels, better known as Hitler’s propaganda minister.
If we see the actual role that the so-called information ministries have played as propaganda outfits in Third World dictatorships and democracies alike, for instance in India and intermittently in Pakistan, you couldn’t tell one from the other.
Just one look at her recent predecessors in Pakistan and a few counterparts in India would illustrate the point of the argument. One of Ms Rehman’s predecessors in Pakistan was Mr Sheikh Rashid Ahmed. Which part of his legacy would she discard and, more importantly, what are his contributions in the service of free media that she would preserve? In India, there was Indira Gandhi, followed among others by Inder Gujral, Vidya Charan Shukla and Lal Kishan Advani who donned the mantle of information ministers.
Do you know the odd man out? It was Mr Gujral. He resigned from Mrs Gandhi’s cabinet against her excesses, press censorship being one of the worst outcomes of her decision to suspend civil liberties. The job was then assigned to Mr Shukla who became one of the most notorious ministers to be inducted into the Indian cabinet. Ask any journalist, any editor from that period.
And what great deeds was Mr Advani credited with during his brief tenure in 1977-78? He was assigned the job ostensibly to undo the horrors of the emergency censorship (imposed by former information minister, Mrs Gandhi!). But he did no better than to stuff the ministry with RSS acolytes and then use it to promote religious obscurantism and ethnic mistrust in the country whose nefarious legacy we can still feel so palpably around us.
Before Pakistan’s current cabinet was announced, there were happier tidings in the media that Ms Rehman would be given the foreign ministry, a great prospect in my view given the range of her journalism and sheer insights on diplomacy and strategic issues. I would have personally liked her to take the human rights ministry, not at all glamorous and involving hard work, but touching all the real issues that prompted the collapse of Pakistan’s ancien regime.
To be fair to her, last week she piloted an important bill to shore up press freedoms in her country. And then she condoled the murder of a journalist in Balochistan. But all this may not be quite sufficient to halt the institutional abuse of power particularly against the media. What Pakistan and for that matter India need together with other developing countries is an equivalent of the American First Amendment as part of a new Bill of Rights.
But that would require a sweeping mandate and too much political courage to carry out. Not that the First Amendment has not produced a culture of ‘embedded’ media. It’s a very tall order, one that has the potential to turn into a veritable Chartist Movement that aimed to throw out the anti-people ‘king, queen and parliament’ but ended up in a farce. However, short of a major surgery the growing cancer of state controls and corporate hold on the media is likely to remain a recurring feature of our times.
In Britain, the information minister’s post was created briefly during the First World War when Lord Beaverbrook inaugurated it in February 1918 only to be soon wound up under the care of Lord Downham on Jan 10, 1919. The ministry was revived again at the start of the Second World War when Lord Macmillan took charge in September 1939, and it lasted through the war only to be folded up on March 31, 1946. What are Pakistan’s compulsions, and India’s, to keep the ministry intact?
The initial functions of Britain’s ministry in its second avatar were threefold: news and press censorship, home publicity and overseas publicity in Allied and neutral countries. And in pursuing this objective there was a degree of integrity that we lack today. Not that everything was above board or transparent in Britain. According to the records, planning for such an organisation had started in October 1935 under the auspices of the Committee for Imperial Defence, largely conducted in secret.
In the 1930s, communications activities had become a recognised function of government. Several departments though had established public relations divisions, and were reluctant to give this up to central control. When the ministry was dissolved in March 1946, its residual functions passed to the British Central Office of Information, a central organisation providing common and specialist information services. That’s how it still works. In France, the minister of information, also called minister of propaganda, was a cabinet member from 1938 to 1974. The position no longer exists.
Information ministers in our patch often have to pamper and indulge the media to keep them off the scent of a story that could otherwise bring embarrassment to the government. There are variants. Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf was Iraq’s minister of information in the last days of the Saddam Hussein government, and he is best remembered as a source of humour and amusement amid the tragedy that was already shrouding his country.
On one occasion the Iraqi military itself was fooled by the creative reporting of al-Sahaf. According to one account quoting former commanders of Iraqi forces, after the information minister claimed that Iraqi forces had retaken the Baghdad airport from US troops, Republican Guard Gen Mohammed Daash was dispatched to check out a rumour that four or five American tanks had survived the Iraqi counterattack. Daash returned to his headquarters in a panic. “Four or five tanks!” the commanders quoted Daash as telling his fellow generals. “Are you out of your minds? The whole damn American army is at the airport!”
I do not know much about the reasons for the transition of Mr Mushahid Hussain from journalism to becoming minister of information, but being a sensitive observer and an outspoken journalist Ms Rehman will inevitably confront the demons that every conscientious hack carries with them.
One of these challenges is posed by the propaganda model theory of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman who use it to explain growing systemic biases in the mass media and their structural economic causes. “The 20th century has been characterised by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy,” they said in their book, Manufacturing Consent: the Political Economy of the Mass Media. The thesis will not bother an average information minister. But it should concern those who also happen to have been good journalists. n
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
jawednaqvi@gmail.com