With the help of a series of images and sound bytes taken from talk shows and news programs on these channels, the documentary reveals how the media promoted demonstrations against Chávez, and how the programming on these channels created an anti-Chávez climate leading to the day of the coup.
According to the Venezuelan TV channels, the coup, led by conservative politicians and backed by some military personnel, was pulled off in the name of “democracy.”
However, the overwhelming agitation and response by Chávez’s main constituency comprising of the urban working classes and the rural peasantry managed to crumple the new government within a week, paving the way for Chávez’s return.
It rudely rendered as biased and sensationalist the claim of the electronic media that had insisted that Chávez’s toppling was a popular undertaking. The claim was nothing more than upper and middle-class wishful thinking propagated by the channels as “revolutionary” and “democratic” action.
The documentary is just too close to what we have been witnessing in Pakistan in the last many years.
This is not to suggest that President Zardari is Chávez – far from it – but the bulk of the Pakistani electronic media is certainly the bastion of new urban middle-class aspirations.
It is a stark reflection of what certain quarters of the country’s urban middle-classes (especially in the Punjab), are metamorphosing into.
In a queer twist and case of irony, people who were demanding radical action in the name of democracy, free media and the judiciary during the Musharraf dictatorship, most of them have had a class history of backing military dictatorships, staunch politico-religious initiatives and social conservatism.
So what made entities like PML (N), Jamat Islami, the electronic media, and political minnows like Imran Khan pose as the new ambassadors of revolutionary politics in Pakistan?
There are two interesting theories that may answer the above question.
The first view is that in countries like Pakistan, whenever a progressive or populist political party manages to graduate from the streets to the corridors of governmental power and gets assimilated by the politics of pragmatism, an ideological vacuum appears.
Consequently, entities that are inherently conservative readjust and repackage their ideological orientation by giving its conservatism a face-lift and start expressing it in a language that was once strictly the linguistic and symbolic gesture of Cold War-era leftists.
Mind you, the irony is, during the Cold War the leftists were gleefully bludgeoned by the same urban classes and political entities who today are claiming fresh revolutionary ground in Pakistan in the name of democracy and the judiciary.
The second theory in this respect is closely-knitted to the above one. It suggests that 2007’s triumphant lawyers’ movement and the agitation exhibited by PML-N, is a symptom of an unprecedented occurrence in which the largest province of Pakistan, the Punjab, has for the first time found itself largely outside the power circles of state and government.
This theory suggests that parties such as the PPP, ANP and MQM that prospered more outside the Punjab in the last fifteen years, have discovered that if together they are able to win most seats in the Khyber Paktunkhwa, Balochistan and Sindh, they can still manage to construct a coalition government at the centre without the need to do well in Punjab.
And the reason why the radical action and language being heard from Punjab’s streets and drawing-rooms today is coming from conservative/rightist elements is because it was largely bourgeois conservatism that flourished in the Punjab as the dominant psyche ever since the 1980s.
So, ever since the Musharraf coup in 1999 and especially after the formation of the PPP-led coalition government in 2008, this conservatism increasingly found itself alienated by a new-found regional alignment at the centre, thus the reaction.
Can this mean that the current trend of “radicalism” among various so-called ‘middle-class forces’ that is being portrayed as a nationwide phenomenon by the electronic media, is basically a chant confined to the Punjab?
Can this also mean that even if there were some genuinely progressive elements in this convoluted ideological malaise, they have completely failed to avoid hijacking bids by reactionary elements (JI), Imran Khan and democratic-conservatives (PML-N)?
The progressive/populist uprising against the Ayub Khan dictatorship in 1968 and the rightist/Islamist movement against the Z A. Bhutto regime in 1977 were both a national phenomenon, encompassing participation of all the four provinces. The celebrated 2005-2007 lawyers’ movement wasn’t. So does this mean the lawyers’ movement too was largely a provincial (Punjabized) phenomenon?
A college friend of mine who was a member of a Baloch students’ outfit once told me that to the Baloch a Punjab-free Pakistan is what sugar-free biscuit is to a diabetic!
He added: “Pakistan’s ideology is the issue of urban Punjabi middle-classes.”
Today if I meet him I’d suggest he sit up and take notice because the middle-class he is talking about is (mainly through the media) all set to dictate the country’s political and ideological discourse more than ever.
Also this discourse, though still confined to urban Pakistan, is going to further fatten itself due to the rapid urbanization of the population of the country.
This fact is bound to isolate political parties whose main vote banks lie in rural and semi-rural areas of the country. Thus, progressive provincialism-friendly federalist parties like the PPP may continue to loose electoral ground to PML-N and certain right-wing upstart parties such as Imran Khan’s Thereek-i-Insaf (TI).
All is still in the making. Though on the surface the expected emergence of dominance of middle-class sentiments in Pakistani politics may be seen as a positive game changer, but it is not necessarily a positive prediction. At least not if the middle-class political discourse in Pakistan fails to update and evolve into something that is less elitist, Punjab-centric and closely knitted with the increasingly damaged (but still dominant) ideological outcome of years of political mating routines between the military, the mullah and the trader classes.
Such an evolution is not an impossibility; MQM has proven it (though in its own topsy-turvy manner), and PML-N (at least Mian Nawaz Sharif) seems to understand the need for such an evolution.
Unfortunately, new parties with the potential to affect middle-class discourse in an evolutionary manner in the Punjab (such as the TI), seem to be heading for the same ideological quicksand in which former middle-class expressions like the Jamat-i-Islami (JI) lost their way.
The urban middle-classes will have to realize that they may hate the populist rural-ism of parties like the PPP but their own political urbanism in this context is not so enlightened an alternative.
