The Moral Brigade Is Back

APRIL 2003 - A recent circular from the Ministry of Information & Media Development is making the rounds, which carries the crusade against ‘Obscenity in Print & Electronic Advertisements’ to its logical conclusion, which is more nonsense and poppycock, though I am the first to admit the poppy word may have the Ministry in convulsions.

The Islamic Ideology Council has recommended action against such advertising agencies who promote in the Ministry’s words, ‘vulgaring and obscenity.’ Well at least they got the obscenity bit right. These laudable objectives are based on the findings of a session of the Council in January 2003, which was highly disturbed that in the guise of offering lucrative careers in modeling, advertising agencies were luring young women into lives of sin. The learned Council was of the opinion that such agencies were probably unlicensed and were operating without any code of ethics. It therefore suggested the appointment of a commission to take stern action against these morally corrupt and wayward organizations, which were merely spreading vulgarity and obscenity while purporting to advertise goods and services. It also asked for the setting up of a regulatory authority to keep a close watch on these morally leviant elements, which were spreading filth in society. No less than a Dr. Ghulam Murtaza Azad, Director General Research has affixed his signatures to the circular.

This is not the first time such ‘action’ has been recommended and it certainly will not be the last time either. ‘Vulgaring’ has been a charge that has been hurled not only at advertising agencies but at every activity that has anything remotely to do with the fine arts, music, dance, painting, et al. The charges have been so generalized that it has been almost impossible for its practitioners to defend themselves. The question remains, what constitutes vulgarity and obscenity, the two dreaded diseases that repeatedly afflict the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. It is a complicated issue because opinions can be very subjective and what you and I may not find vulgar or obscene in the least may send others into a paroxysm of agony. If you start your day, the minute you open your blessed eyes, with spotting examples of vulgarity and obscenity, you will not have to wait too long. Brushing your teeth with forceful strokes of your hardy toothbrush can send your mind spinning into activities that have absolutely nothing to do with brushing teeth, but because we all think differently – thank God for that, we view things differently. What is vulgar however remains a very debatable point but the ramblings of the IIC, once more, are way off the mark. They have been for a long time and each incumbent in Islamabad has felt it his (it is always men) moral duty to wage a crusade against the forces of evil.

In the eighties, when that benevolent and far-sighted General ruled the land whose high moral vision gave us ethnic cleansing and forever split our country into pockets of hate, bigotry and intolerance (while ironically fighting against these very evils), his minister for (dis) information went about cleaning the electronic media. He found hundreds of TV commercials, vulgar and obscene. While these had been on the air for a long time and there was never any evidence that they had caused a serious decline in the moral values of society – there never is, he still felt it his duty to disinfect PTV. Dozens of commercials were taken off; others chopped and sliced into pieces that were rendered senseless. A film of dancing fruits had the minister in convulsions. Whereas everyone saw fruits, he saw other unmentionable objects. The sight of two oranges and a banana dancing was more than he could bear. It was a sad day for fruits. A little girl, perhaps six or seven, running on a beach in a swimming suit (you couldn’t see her legs) had the moral brigade in frenzy. As they pointed out, the suit had two straps and straps you know go where. While the under-attack PTV officials were trying hard to follow the minister’s wandering mind and very free association of ideas, there was more gnashing of the holy teeth. A carbolic soap commercial showing a young man lathering his manly chest under a gushing ‘nalka’ (tap), almost felled the minister, who thought the entire film was suggestive, lewd, vulgar, obscene and ‘furthermore’ as the Sikh joke puts it. PTV lost about ten million in revenue, but were reminded that they had gained immensely in virtue.

For the enlightenment of the worthies who make up the IIC, not that it will cut much ice with them, there exists a strong code of ethics in Pakistan since at least the seventies, which has created problems over and over again since it has, like many codes, a viewpoint that is debatable and not quite balanced in the upstairs department. However, all the practitioners of the black arts have chosen to live within its often-strange pronouncements. Most advertising agencies, which are not in the business of luring young women into lives of sin, live on the same planet as the IIC and are pretty well versed in what can pass the censors and what can’t. PTV’s censor board is made of steel walls ten feet thick. Anything that remotely is suggestive doesn’t get through. It’s been like that for years. Agencies, scriptwriters, filmmakers and others, know what can work. They are not idiots. In print advertising too, in all responsible and mature publications, be they newspapers or magazines, certain established norms of taste are observed. There are always cases where things are depicted which can be borderline cases, but no quality publication sets out to sell sin and get away with it. Not here. So while this may come as a surprise to the IIC, each media and its practitioners follow an unwritten but well understood code that regulates their creative outpouring. Rather than turn their swords on the advertising profession, the IIC may well take a good long look at the cinema, particularly the one that flourishes more than the poppy in the MMA’s backyard, where high vulgarity is now fully standardized or direct its gaze on the hundreds of wall chalkings that establish this as a sex starved, impotent and sexually inadequate nation of men or the hundreds of medicines and fly by night operations where quacks and frauds offer miracle cures, even promising those no longer virgins the magic of becoming the same again.

Using women tastelessly in advertising has been going on for years, even in the emancipated west and there is no doubt that there are many cases where they are exploited without relevance, to sell anything from car batteries to bull dozers. To regulate this is a serious problem because it is far too complicated a matter to implement. However, there is in every country, a framework that restricts and regulates communication so that it does not get offensive. As and when these codes are violated, even in the evil west, action is taken. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but here in Pakistan, the heavy-handed approach has only had the opposite effect. Women in society are targetted as sex objects and the reasons are not billboards. Our repressive and narrow thinking has put women at a disadvantage in a society were the males go unchecked. This attitude has led to the rise of vulgar behaviour rather than its control.

Who are we to guide the IIC which is perched on high moral ground, but it does need a reality check, remove its blinkers and understand what is going on and what actually constitutes ‘vulgaring’ and obscenity. Disfiguring faces of women on billboards, to us is vulgar and obscene, the work of sick, sexually depraved men. That should be stopped, not the work that appears on the billboards.