https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/goa/still-trying-to-shoot-the-messenger/articleshow/66035138.cms
Cyril Almeida is on tenterhooks again. For the second time in two years, the brilliant Pakistani journalist (with ancestral roots in Goa) stands charged with treason, and banned from travelling abroad. Last year, huge controversy erupted after his exclusive story about clashes between Pakistan’s government and military leadership. This time, warrants are issued because he quoted former prime minister Nawaz Sharif that “militant organizations are active” and responsible for the devastating 2018 attacks on Mumbai. No one disputes the facts, or the quotes. Still, there’s an overwhelming urge to punish the journalist for simply doing his job very well, which fits right into an alarming global trend to suppress information and muzzle the media. Even excepting Almeida’s consistently remarkable truth-telling, it’s hazardous to be a journalist in Pakistan. Earlier this month, the international Committee to Protect Journalists reported “conditions for the free press are as bad as when the country was under military dictatorship” with “media under siege.” But similar trends are intensifying across the subcontinent. In Bangladesh, the cerebral photographer and cultural activist Shahidul Alam has spent weeks in jail (while being denied bail) for “spreading propaganda and false information against the government.” Meanwhile India has a myriad similar examples, from the shocking unresolved murder of Kashmiri editor Shujaat Bukhari earlier this year, to last week’s silly charges of sedition against Congress’s Divya Spandana for the crime of being rude about Narendra Modi on Twitter (which she promptly repeated). >From Socrates to Shah Jehan to Amit Shah, the inherent nature of power seeks control over what is known and said. Every government tries to massage and manipulate (or murder) public opinion, generally by any means necessary. But things have become radically more complicated in the 21stcentury, due to the Internet’s proliferation, and the mind-boggling reach of social media. Today, images and ideas flash everywhere in the world simultaneously, directly to the eyeballs and fingertips of billions of people. It’s far beyond the capacity to control of any would-be censor. So now the backlash. Having being proven incapable of stopping the free-flow of ideas and information, powerful entities all over the world are seeking to discredit and destroy the messengers instead. Look almost anywhere, and you will find cynical charges of treason, sedition and disloyalty being levied wholescale against the media. The cry of “fake news” is heard worldwide. In the Philippines, controversial strongman Rodrigo Duterte responded to well-documented accusations of corruption by demanding a ban on the media company, saying, “You went overboard, you are not only throwing toilet paper, you are throwing shit at us.” In the United States, even with its extraordinary Bill of Rights guaranteeing press freedoms, Donald Trump regularly refers to journalists as “enemies of the people,” the potent charge coined by Stalin to justify genocidal purges. Its meaning is identical to India’s own contemporary polarizing slur-du-jour, “anti-national.” But here’s the main lesson to learn from all this tumult and turmoil. You can ban a newspaper, but not the truth. As the eminent Konkani writer (who himself faces death threats from extremists) Damodar Mauzo often says, “no bullet can kill a thought.” Ever since the dawn of the World Wide Web, we’ve been enthralled by the promise of “the information superhighway” but that metaphor falls far short of what actually happened, with the rise of Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp, plus 2.5 billion smartphones distributed to every corner of the planet. In this riotous uncontrollable babel, we can see some are desperately trying to play traffic cop, armed only with outmoded laws (sedition and treason are both decidedly 19thcentury concepts) and laughably ineffective bully pulpits. They always fail, and will continue to do so until the realization seeps in that we live in an irrevocably altered universe of meaning. Just like water finds its own level, information has always wanted to be free. Now nobody can stop it.