PTI chief Imran Khan has obviously hit a nerve, and now all efforts are being made to ensure that he does not get his message across. The ban by PEMRA on live broadcasts of his speeches may have been stayed, but his Peshawar rally speech was not broadcast live. As an additional flourish, YouTube went off the Internet for Pakistani users at the time of his speech, and was restored only after it was over. The only effect seems to have been to deprive those who earn through their YouTube channels. Both TV and Youtube showed recordings later, as if the purpose was to stop the spreading of Mr Khan’s views, it was only delayed by a matter of minutes.
There is a harder path, that of developing a counter-narrative, proving Mr Khan’s narrative wrong. Mr Khan’s opponents should realize that he has views which are worthy of attention, and the media cannot ignore them. An informed electorate is the bedrock of any democracy, and if the present government, the armed forces, and other interested groups, want democracy to flourish, they must ensure that Mr Khan is as able to express his views as any other person. If he says something objectionable, he should be punished, but only after he said it, and the judiciary decides he has violated the law, not because anybody in the executive feels embarrassed.
More important than the losses incurred is the derision worldwide that Pakistan will face because of the YouTube shutdown. The lesson for everyone is that any institution powerful and thin-skinned enough will arbitrarily shut down social media to delay a message. However, the days of control have gone. Apart from technological means of overcoming such barriers, like VPNs in this case, it is impossible to shut down social media. If the worst comes to the worst, it would be possible to put up a platform outside the country to spread subversive messages. The fate of the original remarks by Mr Khan which provoked this, at his Faisalabad rally, should be an object lesson: they are freely available for all who want to hear on social media.
