In the not-so-far past, Pakistan has faced two major crisis situations where relief and rescue were the chief problems. The two instances were the 2008 Earthquake and the IDPs issue during the Swat operation. To be crudely honest, both occurrences were manifest of the fact that Pakistan is very poorly equipped to tackle any disaster situation, human or natural. Lack of food or medical supplies, delayed rescue, corruption in foreign aid and similar other things through these happenings clearly depicted that there is no solid policy neither governmental organization that is ready-at-go whenever the need arises for emergency deliverance from a calamity. One hoped, despite all pessimism, that perhaps an initiative will be taken after the two cases towards establishing such an agency as would be more effective in minimizing the post-effects of such tragedies. Nevertheless, the current catastrophe that has yet again killed thousands and displaced millions is a proof enough to ascertain that nothing of the sort was among the priorities.
As I write these lines, the latest reports put the death toll from floods at some 1,100 with 1.5 million affectees and some 100,000 plagued by diseases like cholera. Most of those affected are stranded at remote areas, away from safety, with no food or shelter or clean water and with no access to medical facilities. The waters are still raging on and more villages are vulnerable to disaster, risking yet many more thousands of lives. The only organization that is effectively doing the rescue work is the Army, thanks to its technical advancement and immediate personnel deployment. Apart from it, there barely is an organized, effective and large-scale contribution from any other quarter.
However, my intent in this article is not to criticize the government. I’ll come to that later, for the televangelists are already vociferating loud exclamations about government’s utter failure manifest in the Air Blue Crash. It’s the response media and Pakistani blogosphere generally made to the flood disaster that I seek to write about.
Flood has been raging and razing to ground properties and villages since many days now. And there’s not end to it, at least not yet as Sindh stays at a high alert and many areas of Punjab have been evacuated due to excessive inundations. This simple means that the hell that has broken loose and it’s post-effects are far from over and need serious consideration in the media circles. However, what has appalled me is an utterly careless, stolid response of the Pakistan media in general and the blogosphere in particular towards this issue. While there have been posts after posts on the issue of Air Blue place crash, which I fully endorse, there has been a sort of mute dumbness on the flood disaster. I’ve been desperately running from blog to blog but I have barely seen a post about it on any of the major blogs of Pakistan. Not only that, the casual bloggers too seem not to give a damn about it and if at all, have given it a passive sympathy in one-liners of short briefers.
Is it a co-incidence? Are the forums so overwhelmed with plane crash posts for now that the flood-posts would be in the coming soon? Well, I don’t think so. And the reason being that our blogosphere, which we proudly cite as the chief tool of citizen journalism and free discourse, seems to be dragging along the same lines as the conventional media – those of sensational journalism. Whereas plane crash immediately hit the hype and became the hot-dog in media circles, the millions of affectees are not worth a post! Don’t we see a stark difference in our attitudes towards the two happenings?
Why is this so? Why the disparity? To me, the only thing that comes off as a sound reason is that the plane crash was a federal incident. It happened right in Islamabad, involved learned, educated and some elite personnel and was immediately accessible by more or less every media outlet. The inundated lands, on the other hand, are remote, largely inaccessible right now, and simply, a boring thing to report. Who’d prefer watching lives lost in a water over-flow to those lost in a plane crash anyway? In this land of pure, the weight age of human lives certainly seems to differ from area to area and class to class.
Another thing that struck me while trying to decipher this conundrum is that since Pakistan’s online populace is mostly based in either Karachi or Punjab’s developed regions, maybe the huge loss of lives is too unconcerned and detached an issue to report and make some noise about. Why bother when our immediate circles or areas are unaffected.
I admit this may be bit too crude for some of us and may be too gross a conclusion but after hungrily searching blogs for information and opinion over flood and flood relief efforts, this is the only valid argument I can arouse. I must note here that there have been certain blogs making very laudable initiatives such as organizing relief camps and enlisting relief agencies (Secular Pakistan, LUBP etc). But the online Pakistani populace, at large, is silent at the flood saga. And that, I must say, is a big disappointment to me.
I think it’s time that we revise and think over the basis upon which we wish to construct our blog ethics. Before this facet of blog-activism also relapses into the conventional waters of traditional media, we ought to pause for a moment and think is it really the direction we’d been aspiring for? I guess each of us will have his/her answer.
- Salman Latif
No comments:
Post a Comment