Political Talk Defies Ban in Pakistan

Another cable channel, ARY One World, was shut down for 18 days and returned this week after entering into an unofficial agreement to stop broadcasting its major talk show. Staff members celebrated Friday night with a candlelight vigil outside the station's offices. Inside, staffers edited excerpts from the sidewalk edition of "Capital Talk" to mention in their newscast later that night.

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"We have agreed to some issues, but we have not accepted their dictates. We are giving full coverage to all political activities," said Mohsin Raza, the Islamabad news director. He said that the government had squeezed the channel by detaining several correspondents but that authorities were under international pressure not to shut down independent TV entirely.

A third channel, Aaj, was also returned to the air after dropping another popular talk show. Its host, journalist Talat Hussain, said that for the past several years, the late-night panel discussions and their high-profile anchors had "defined issues and given people perspectives" that often contradicted the official version put out on state media.

"We always had an uneasy and dangerous existence, and our transmissions were constantly being interrupted," Hussain said. "This time, they were going for the bigger kill, so they decided to black us out."

If his show were on the air today, he added, "we would say that Musharraf has abrogated the constitution and imposed martial law. But you will not see that issue debated in Pakistan now. Until the country is back on a constitutional, normal path, I can't see this problem being resolved."

For English speakers and foreign communities in major cities, there is still ample access to a variety of political views, including anti-government newspaper commentaries and cartoons, and carefully mild political debates on daytime TV talk shows. Even under emergency rule, columnists have freely lambasted Musharraf as a dictator, often in heavily sarcastic language.

The Jang Group corporation, which controls the News International newspaper as well as Geo, has confronted Musharraf and emergency rule head on. In a scathing editorial last week, editors at the News said they would stand up for press independence even if it meant losing millions of dollars. They accused Musharraf of "paranoia" verging on "madness" and demanded that he end his "draconian reign of terror."

But newspapers have tiny circulations in this country of 165 million, so only a handful of Pakistanis will ever read such stirring calls to resistance, let alone hear them on Geo. Despite pleas from Jang officials, the United Arab Emirates government, washing its hands of Pakistani politics, agreed to pull the plug on Geo's transmissions last week.

Now, the only way for Pakistanis to tune in to "Capital Talk" is to physically follow its host, guests and studio set -- complete with a semicircle of chairs around a coffee table with a fake-flower arrangement -- to the national university campus, where it was held Thursday, or the sidewalk in front of the ramshackle offices of the Islamabad-Rawalpindi Press Club, where it was located Friday.

As the street audience cheered and cackled, applauded and hissed at comments from various speakers on the stage, Mir seemed to be presiding over one of the few genuine -- if messy -- democratic events Pakistan has seen in a long time.

"It is our duty to tell the people what is happening in our country, and we will continue to do so, even if we have to conduct our programs in the footpaths," he vowed.

Below the stage, the audience -- a hodgepodge of opposition activists, sidewalk vendors, old men in religious caps, students with irreverent posters and even a retired army officer or two -- burst into wild applause.