What I perceive as one of the
biggest problems of Pakistan is the interconnected problem of large scale
ethnic, lingual, and cultural divide among its citizens. We are perhaps one of
those countries where individual differences are reported and valued stronger
than the commonalities at different manifests of importance. The ghost which is
hunting us most since our very inception is the prevalence of ethnocentric
groups’ formation of either being a Baluchi, Punjabis, Pashtun, Sindhi, Seraiki,
Muhajir, Chitrali, Kohistani, and Hindko rather than the ‘Pakistani’.
No doubt, the need for egalitarian society exists and has been voiced several
times over the years by intelligentsia, but the struggle for it usually ends up
in beginning of another ethnic conflict in Pakistan. Despite of offering
resolution, Political parties exploit all this in turn to get an existence fuel
for their presence in the coming years.
though diversity contributes to culture and creative richness, yet in case of
Pakistan, the division among the people on the basis of economic disparities,
geographic associations, language, religion, cultism has not only affected our
economy and progress, adversely, but the Urdu-Bengali conflict has also led us
to war in 1971 between the Eastern and Western parts of our country, which
resulted in division of the country and creation of an independent state.
Despite of the loss of thousands of precious innocent lives in the past two or
three decades, the problem of ethnicity tends to intensify with the passage of
time.
Keeping in view the impact of media on society in Pakistan, media Houses and
universities need to develop media contents aimed at bridging the differences
between ethnic and sectarian groups by highlighting their commonalities and
similarities, instead of highlighting their differences.
Though media is never supposed of to operate to reduce conflict however the
presentation of accurate, balanced and impartial reporting can help a lot in
conflict reduction.
Essence of Conflict Sensitive Journalism and getting command on technical
aspects of the program's contents, like how to do prior research, theme workout,
putting hooks, transition and multiple sources, scripts etc will place
Journalists in a position to have the required confidence to produce programs
having such active and progressive themes. As usually the lack of confidence on
a part of the journalist ruins implementation of creative ideas. Similarly,
programs on themes trying to provoke people into thinking in terms of
similarities are probable to lose impact all due to the reason that journalist
wasn't able to wrap it up with conventional structure despite of having novel
and relevant ideas. I believe it is the reason why journalists from rural areas,
despite of availability, fails to produce valued contents.