A rowdy public debate.

Byline: Arifa Noor

BACK in 2005, private news channels were still a new phenomenon in Pakistan and there were just a handful of them. Hence, the channels were experimenting with show formats and topics; and one such experiment on Geo had Hina Bayat, who now acts in dramas, hosting a show on 'social' issues.

One evening, in 2005, she bravely picked up sexual abuse and incest. If memory serves one right, she discussed a couple of cases - one of which was of a woman being abused by a close relative - with two guests of whom one was a psychiatrist. It was not a comfortable watch, not because of the details of the woman's story, which was handled sensitively and ably by the host, but because it was unusual for such an issue to be discussed on television in Urdu.

It was a riveting watch, a show that has not slipped entirely from the mind over a decade later. Shortly afterwards, Geo's office in Karachi was attacked and it was said to be because of an interview of Shimon Peres that The News had carried. After all these years, in my head, the attack is tangled up with the show which seemed to disappear too.

The show was memorable because as an English-language journalist at a time when print was queen and television was the nouveau-riche, struggling to be recognised, the assumption was that many 'sensitive' issues discussed with relative freedom in English were no-go areas in Urdu.

TV will continue to force many issues into the public sphere and the resulting debate will be uncomfortable.

This included rights issues as well as political ones. At a workshop once, a woman reporter (frequently by-lined as lady reporter) said that she was envious of the issues raised and discussed in English-language newspapers.

The lower circulation of English-languge newspapers allowed them a level of liberty denied to their Urdu-language counterparts, we were told. We wrote of militancy, Hudood, blasphemy law, nationalism, two-nation theory etc with a freedom not allowed to the more fettered Urdu press.

Indeed, in some way the fearless English press of Pakistan was not part of the public debate or what in social science is described as the public sphere. In order for an issue to be discussed in the public sphere, it must allow access to the larger populace as well as discussion with as few restrictions as possible. The English newspapers' limited circulation and limited access, due to the language barrier, brought it closer to what can be described as drawing-room...