FROM A RINGSIDE SEAT

Parliamentary reporters finally succeeded on Wednesday morning in securing an apology from the government for the manhandling of their colleagues by the Lahore police last week and called off their boycott of the National Assembly proceedings. Negotiations in the cafeteria between a ministerial team led by Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao and the five-member journalists committee clinched the agreement.
As per the agreement, in a statement from the floor of the House, the Interior minister regretted the Lahore incident of April 17, adding that the journalists' right to report is sacrosanct and should be accepted and respected by all across the country's otherwise inhospitable political landscape.
]Of course the government action fell short of many journalists' expectation, as they wanted the House to pass a unanimous resolution condemning the action of the Punjab government. But they ended the boycott, more in deference to the decision made by their senior colleagues than responding to the call for defiance by their bruised egos.
The writer of this piece was one of the members of the journalists committee. He also accepted the proposition that the Interior minister would make a statement that what happened in Lahore was "regrettable", instead of persevering in his earlier stand that the National Assembly should unanimously pass a condemnatory resolution. The sanctity of this column demands that the factors that injected shift in his stand should be spelt out.
On Monday, when the boycott was launched and on the day after at least three encounters took place between the journalists and the ministers in the latter's successive bids to defuse the tension and bring the protestors back to the Press Gallery. Invariably the journalists raised the demand that the House should pass a resolution condemning the Punjab government "by name". On all three occasions the ministerial team did not respond to this particular demand. By Wednesday morning it was clear to every sane mind that given the peculiar location of the Punjab chief minister in the present power structure in the country, the treasury benches in the National Assembly will not agree to this proposal. So, what was the next best option with the journalists?
Then there was the question of how long the boycott could be carried on. The official machinery was already on the move and had conveyed its mind to a number of vulnerable quarters in the newspaper industry. No disrespect is intended but the fact is that given the history of growth of this industry one would believe that quite a few blades of grass would welter under the pressure of strong winds. Press advice and advertisement inducements go hand in hand, and that would have triggered a split in the ranks of the journalists bringing down the whole edifice built around the parliamentary reporters' long-in-use weapon to boycott the proceedings, for once and all.
Quite unfortunately, as soon as the boycott was announced the opposition parties entered the arena with their own specific agendas to fish in the troubled waters. Is it not hypercritical that while the activists of a particular party were circulating the draft of the projected condemnatory resolution their mentors on the floor of the House would not let go any opportunity to make speeches and stage walkout? That was shocking to many pen pushers who were committed as they are to their cause for protest but would not like it to be hijacked by politicians. The journalist community is fed up with the never-ending confrontation between the so-called 'lifafa' journalists and freeloaders.
And, what moral high ground we stand at as journalists? What does a political party expect from you when it pays for your travel to Dubai, looks after your boarding and lodging? Why you are on the list of the invitees and not the one whose beat includes that party's day to day activities? This is the time for soul-searching for the members of journalist community.
But having said this it would still be very essential to insist that freedom of press should be respected. Its operators should be spared of mayhem irrespective of the kind of their product. Depriving them of their tools of work amounts to snatching their right to work. They constitute the Fourth Estate and the Press Gallery is the extension of the Parliament. Surely, with hindsight the government of Punjab must have realised that in this age and time corporal punishment of journalists is bad in taste. Let many flowers blossom!
As soon as journalists returned to the Press Gallery, the opposition reactivated its push for debate on its various privilege motions against detention of its members. Since their speeches on Monday and Tuesday did not see the light of the day due to the boycott by the media it was all the more important for them that these motions were discussed. But the government had tricks up its sleeves: Sher Afgan, the minister incharge of parliamentary affairs, did not oppose the motions and as such these motions were referred to the privileges committee barring the one about detention of MMA member Qazi Hameedullah. The Speaker, saying its mover Hafiz Hussain Ahmad has used obnoxious language and in return earned expunction and non-action on the motion, apparently killed it.