Daily Times

What do you call it when you don’t know what it is but you’re not allowed to ask because it’s not up for debate? It’s ‘The National Interest’. Sounds pretty good on the tin but nobody knows what’s in it except a few powerful people with guns. They say they have worked it out, presumably through sophisticated algorithms and superior deductive powers that we can never grasp or question. We must simply accept it on a ‘take my word for it’ basis.

Ever notice how it’s almost always invoked to explain something insidious: disappearances, censorship, wars, torture, houbara hunts, cyber crime laws, illegal surveillance, jailing of journalists and various doctrines of necessity du jour. How come no one ever says it’s in the national interest to eliminate extreme poverty? Or to protect minorities or promote tourism or build a hospital or make a road? No, anytime a debate needs to be shut down, trusty old ‘national interest’ appears, like a one-size-fits-all strait jacket embracing any dissent- a fig leaf for totalitarianisms of all stripes.

It’s no coincidence that the concept was first introduced by Nicolo Machiavelli in his notorious treatise on power; ‘The Prince’, once dubbed ‘a handbook for gangsters’ by Bertrand Russell. The national interest or Raison d’etat [reasons of the state] holds Machiavelli, allows for reprehensible acts to be committed in the ‘larger interest’. Princely virtue, he says is “the willingness to overcome certain acceptable rules to perpetuate through either force or kindness the will of the state”. One can only guess what’s on Chaudhry Nisar’s bedside reading pile these days. Then again maybe ‘pile’ is too generous.

Still, it’s nice that the Minister, (who does not have a Facebook account) is taking such an interest in social media. If only some of this enthusiasm to ban was directed at terror groups who operate with shocking impunity on Facebook as revealed by this paper. Alas, no such concern. Last week it was blasphemy. This week it’s the national interest. The Minister feels the army must not be criticised. He first said there are laws that prevent this (there are none), he now wants to create a code of conduct for 30 million social media users to prevent said criticism. Why do we need a code of conduct if there are already laws that prevent certain criticisms? “Oh it’s not the law? Well let’s make it the law”, is the attitude.

Anytime a debate needs to be shut down, the trusty excuse of national interest appears like a one-size-fits-all strait jacket crushing dissent

Might it not be reasonable to ask the people who invoke national interest to throw journalists in dungeons and hack into our social media accounts, to show us their track record in protecting that very national interest? What could be more in line with the national interest than the National Action Plan against terrorism, where a near impossible consensus was achieved and inked with the blood of the nation’s children to whom we swore an oath to rid our land of its greatest menace. That plan entrusted to the Interior Ministry has been deemed a ‘monumental failure’ by the one of the most respected judges in the country in the landmark Quetta commission report. The fact that the Minister cavorts with banned groups and has consistently gone out of his way to protect the brazen terror cleric Abdul Aziz who killed 12 Pakistan army soldiers has not appeared to raise excessive concerns about National security either. Was the army’s honour not at stake then? Why does this not constitute a part of the national interest, orders of magnitude above and beyond what someone said on Facebook?

The plan to muzzle social media may not come to pass fully, but it has already delivered its intended payload: fear. The growing instinct to self-censor may swell into something bigger if not checked now. It has only been a matter of weeks between the start of the crackdown and the first death sentence. Before it becomes a juggernaut, it’s worth considering the fundamentals at stake here. In facing this onslaught from the state, journalists, bloggers, lawyers, activists must appropriate the phrase ‘national interest’ to convey what it really means: the preservation of democratic values for which great struggles have been fought- not one hopes, so that we’d become a nation of frightened people cowering over keyboards. Our freedom of speech is non negotiable. We must remind ourselves and our overzealous public servants that all institutions exist for the benefit of people and not the other way around. The citizens of this country have more at stake in its well-being than anyone else, and must not be treated like threatening suspects by those who are there to serve them. We must insist on this and reiterate what’s really in the national interest: to eliminate extremism, to stop persecution, to end exploitation, to have accountable institutions, to re haul the education system, to provide jobs for young people, to empower women, to protect the vulnerable.

More crucially: we must beware of those who seek to erect sacred cows- in the national interest. We must guard against totalitarian impulses- in the national interest. We must protect our right to criticise state institutions – in the national interest. Those who love their country must equally hate all that sullies it. We must raise our voices against every cruelty in our land precisely because we love it so much. We must do this in the national interest.

The writer is a journalist and documentary filmmaker. He tweets @ziadzafar