By Cyril Almeida

MORAL outrage has become fashionable in Pakistan. While public officials have always stolen, lied, misbehaved and generally acted like they are doing the rest of us a favour by pretending to run the affairs of the state, there now exists a media echo chamber which delights in exposing the foibles of public figures. No one, it seems, is safe from its attention. Or are they?

Shumaila Rana, the Punjab Assembly member caught on camera using a stolen credit card, clearly isn’t one of the lucky ones. Video evidence in hand, the electronic media went to town on her story, certain that her scalp would be theirs. Never mind that so patently unintelligent was her crime that more than hubris it points towards her perhaps having a psychological problem.

Of course crime should be punished, but the punishment should fit the crime. The media trial of Rana was as predictable as it was excessive and misguided. Contrast Rana’s crime with a startling statement published in Dawn yesterday.

One of Karachi’s top cops, CCPO Waseem Ahmed, commenting on the spate of killings in the city that has claimed the lives of over 100 political activists since the beginning of the year, remarked: “We have all the details of the youths who have been involved in the targeted killings, but political considerations and constraints have deterred us from picking up the suspects.”

Over 100 people are dead. The police say they know where to find the killers. But “political considerations and constraints” are blocking the police from doing their job.

So will the hordes urging CJ Iftikhar to fix everything from the price of petrol to the shortage of water in our rivers demand he make sure the Karachi police do their job? Will the talking heads on TV breathlessly report the telling confession of the CCPO? Will media outlets set up cameras outside his office and home and pursue him relentlessly and demand he explain what he meant? Of course not.

The dead in Karachi belong primarily to rival factions of the MQM and for many that’s all they need to and want to know. A ‘political’ problem will get a ‘political’ resolution and the city will, hopefully, return to normal sooner rather than later. Moral outrage, then, clearly has its limits. But the point isn’t that the people are wasting their time focusing on the foibles of minor politicians like Shumaila Rana when far more important, life-and-death matters await their attention.

 The point is to understand why moral outrage exists in some circumstances and not others and to figure out how to harness public pressure and apply it for the wider good. Rana and her stolen credit card have all the ingredients of a good scandal: there is a single, identifiable culprit rather than a host of complex reasons; the culprit is an elected official, generally a class that is viewed with suspicion and dislike; her crime is easily understood — she used someone else’s credit card; and there is video evidence.

She never stood a chance. But when you move from the specific to the general, from the simple to the complex, other variables tend to create uncertainty. CCPO Waseem Ahmed’s statement ostensibly amounts to an open-and-shut case of dereliction of duty — he, a policeman, is meant to provide security and he is acknowledging that he doesn’t. Yet nobody would be harsh on Ahmed.

I’ve never met the man and for all I know he could be a good man and a good cop. And I do know that Karachi is a thuggish city where mafias and political violence are a fact of life. I also know that nobody in the media or in the political firmament or in the law-enforcement agencies is absolutely certain why precisely people are being killed at the rate they are in recent weeks.

There are theories and guesses, rumours and stories, but no facts other than the dead bodies, no evidence or recordings of secret meetings and incriminating conversations, no peg on which the people can hang their outrage. The level of fact-finding involved before villains can be unearthed and become the target of public opprobrium and subsequently be directly held accountable for the deaths is simply too high and too dangerous for anyone in the media or the public to manage it.

But public outrage can be harnessed to effect change in other complicated areas. Take the example of petrol, the price of which has caused a furore in recent weeks and threatened the stability of state institutions. Everyone has focused on the carbon tax and the petroleum levy because they are easy to identify and comprehend and because the villain was clear — a federal government bent on taxing the poor.

Yet there are other villains hidden in the price of petrol; the oil marketing companies, the dealers and the refineries have all earned staggering profits in recent times.

But because it involves complicated accounting, because it requires understanding a complex pricing method, because there are so many explanations and counter-explanations proffered, only the experts can clarify the situation, and then too in a complicated-sounding way.

In fact, the rationalisation of the prices charged by the various companies in the petroleum chain could well reduce the price of kerosene, diesel and petrol by as much as the petroleum levy/carbon tax. But that fact doesn’t get much attention because there is no organisation, pressure group or public lobby that has systematically studied the issue, published reports on it, prepared one-pagers to hand out to politicians, the media and the public, and tried to build up media and public support for its cause.

There are good reasons why such organisations and public-interest lobbies and pressure groups haven’t been set up before: they are expensive endeavours and the returns are uncertain. But what’s changed in recent years is the arrival of a raucous, hungry-for-scandal electronic media that has real power.

Where before those trying to influence policymakers and public officials had to approach them directly, now they can climb on the media soapbox and take their case to the public. They can say to the people: you’re being ripped off and this is how; your security is being compromised and here’s why and what can be done about it.

So if the hapless Shumaila Rana and the dozens who will no doubt follow her alert some people to the possibilities of the media-public outrage combine, then their humiliations will not have been in vain. But if the media’s potential to effect serious, long-lasting, institutional change is not tapped, then I suspect it will remain what it is today: full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Writer’s Email: [email protected]

-{Source: DAWN}-