No privacy in Pakistan - ARIF AZAD

EDWARD Snowden has done the world immense good by exposing the National Security Agency’s worldwide snooping on unsuspecting citizens and government officials. While the rest of the world has reacted vehemently to these revelations, these have elicited nothing more than a yawn here despite the fact that Pakistan has been the prime subject of such surveillance.

Our response comes from cultural and political norms that accord low salience to the issue of privacy despite this right being enshrined in the Constitution. The under-emphasis on Article 14, which ensures the right to privacy, is a further illustration of how low-ranked this issue is even among the human rights activists.

The right to privacy, as we know it today, was first floated by Warren and Brandeis in 1890 in the Harvard Law Review. In the article the duo argued that as civilisation advanced the right to be left alone became necessary. This right to privacy was at the core of protecting an inviolate personality.

Since 1899, all major debates about privacy have been informed by the Warren and Brandeis article and the right to privacy has been incorporated into various international and national legal frameworks.

I tend to think that the right to privacy, as expounded by Warren and Brandeis, is central to Pakistan’s creative and modern future. Our flagrant disregard for the right to privacy has given rise to an assembly line generation which has come to accept the invasion of privacy by the state and powerful social forces as normal. No wonder the concept of privacy has been under siege because our inviolate personality is always subject to larger social and political impositions which are eminently resistible.

Our daily lives are open to unwarranted and unpreventable intrusion from the larger society. The invasion of privacy, or the right to be private or left alone, is breached from the beginning. This begins from the day we are born. From day one children are never allowed space to develop a nice self-corner or hidden private self for themselves. Children of poor and crowded families live in cramped conditions where Wordsworth’s notion of “the individual mind that keeps her own inviolate retirement” never materialises. In affluent homes over-doting and overloaded parents do not let this Wordsworthian notion of privacy come near the child Women fare worse. Many of them, reared on a diet of housewifely duties, remain so immersed in caring for usually large families that there is very little personal space available to them in the household to develop their inner selves. In overcrowded and overworked homes they find refuge in the kitchen which further ties them down to a gendered and unremunerated role.

When they step out of the house their personal space is violated at each step of the way by unwarranted and intense male gazes. In cases where the women can escape to work in offices their personal space is more than likely to be intruded through acts of nuisance or sexual harassment both in office and on the way to and back from work.

You and your privacy are under threat if you are poor and happen to live in an area where the landlord rules the roost. Your personality is not inviolate. You and your family are under constant fear of being intruded upon, picked up or harassed. If you somehow manage to defy the writ of the local landlord, the state institutions are at his beck and call to ensure violation of your privacy. And if you happen to have a run-in with the police and you do not have a hotline to a local notable you are more than likely to be treated shabbily and your privacies regularly interfered with.

In some cases, not only your privacy but the privacy of your larger family is blatantly violated by investigative officers. Your home is no longer your castle. The law is hardly your friend in these matters. When we experience so many indignities to our sense of self we forget that our right to privacy is being violated by the state and its agencies on a daily basis.

The ease with which the new terrorism act giving wide-ranging powers to intelligence and investigative agencies was passed without a squeak of protest shows how much value we attach to our own inviolate personality. Iqbal’s concept of khudi, in fact, sails very close to the notion of the right to privacy as propounded by Warren and Brandeis. At the core of Iqbal’s concept of khudi is also the idea of cultivation and preservation of an inviolate personality. Just as the modern conception of the right to privacy has transformed modern life in the West, its understanding and sustained application can transform the way we see ourselves as nation.

By: ARIF AZAD

Published on Dawn