Ban: to what end?

IN April I was living in Islamabad, in a leafy neighbourhood I had moved to after a few months cooped up in the Red Zone. The talks were on and the city was full of foreign correspondents. We passed a coffee shop on our way out of town and half the café was press.

What I remember is how much everybody loved Islamabad. On camera and off it. The hills, the food, the hospitality. Testimonials. The state was delighted, and none of it required a form.

It is August now. Those same correspondents cannot travel to any city outside Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi to produce a story without a No Objection Certificate from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. The fixers who drove them around must register on a government portal, as must freelancers, translators and camera operators. For a weekend in Murree, a journalist may apply. Permission may be granted within three working days. Feted in April. Registered in August. We do not even change the cast.

And Al Jazeera’s website has not opened from my desk in Karachi since last Sunday. Two browsers, a phone on mobile data. The page sits there and gives up. No order has been published. The PTA has confirmed nothing. What the ministry did say was that it had taken note of Al Jazeera’s “selective reporting”, that the channel had sought to “misrepresent” the elections in Azad Jammu and Kashmir, and that such “yellow journalism” confirmed the agenda of external actors with vested interests.

A government may say that. It should contest any report it dislikes, and it has every means to do so. Restricting access to the report is the thing nobody has put in writing. That distinction matters more than it sounds. A rebuttal adds to the record. A block subtracts from it, and what it subtracts is not the story. It is the ability to check the story.

What exactly did the Al Jazeera ban achieve?

Because the appetite does not disappear when the reporting does. Nobody stops wanting to know. They simply take what is left, and what is left is whatever costs nothing to produce. Reporting from a difficult district costs money, time, risk and now paperwork. A monologue about that district, filmed in a bedroom in Lahore or London, costs nothing and is regulated by nobody. Every restriction we impose falls on the expensive, checkable kind of journalism and leaves the cheap, unverifiable kind entirely untouched.

Then, when a figure appears that the state does not like, it has no way to disprove it. It has spent years dismantling the means by which anything could be disproved. The number stands, uncheckable, and the denial is worth exactly as much as the claim.

So, what does a ban achieve?

YouTube was blocked in September 2012 for three years. The film that caused it was never removed from the internet. Anyone determined used a proxy. Parliament passed a unanimous resolution asking for it to end. It lifted only because Google agreed to launch a local version.

X was blocked in February 2024 after being used to raise allegations of election fraud. It returned 15 months later. VPN use is estimated to have risen 6,000 per cent, and Pakistan recorded the highest financial losses in the world from internet restrictions that year. Cabinet ministers used VPNs to reach the platform their own government had blocked. Al Jazeera was blocked once before, in 2013, after publishing the Abbottabad Commission report. The report was read worldwide.

None achieved what the ban was for. Each one ended, but not one because it ‘worked’. What survived each was the impression that the state had something to hide, the one outcome a ban cannot reverse.

We are told each time that this is an exception. A parti­cular provocation, a particular mom­ent. The Foreign Media Facilitation Guidelines, 2026, remove that alibi. They are not a response to anything. They are the permanent version.

On Wednesday, the BBC said it was “extremely concerned” and called for the restrictions to be reversed. Its statement noted that it reaches around 8.6 million people in Pakistan every week, and that its journalists, including local staff here, must be able to travel the country to hear the voices of ordinary citizens.

This is what the ban achieved. Not less scrutiny. A BBC statement, a joint appeal from local and international rights groups, and a week of coverage abroad about Pakistan restricting the press.

The ministry warned of external actors with vested interests. Then it went and produced them.

A confident state does not need to clear the room before it makes its case. It makes the case.

So, who will be left to say what happened. And when nobody is, whose account will we be arguing about next?

The writer is a journalist and conducts writing workshops in Karachi.

X: @ LedeingLady

Published in Dawn, August 9th, 2026