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KARACHI – The militants are clamping down on freedom of speech in Pakistan by threatening journalists who don’t share their views, analysts say.

In February, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) issued a fatwa against some Pakistani media houses and prepared a hit list containing the names of two dozen journalists, publishers and analysts.

Mohammad Shoaib Adil was the publisher of Naya Zamana, a monthly Urdu magazine based in Lahore. It was popular among religious minorities because it covered religious persecution.

Extremists harassed him after he published the autobiography of a retired Lahore High Court judge affiliated with the Ahmadi sect. Under a barrage of threats, Adil recently shut down the magazine and moved his family out of town.

Others have suffered worse fates.

Ali Raza Khwaja, a Karachi-based blogger, was killed by unknown attackers June 26.

Journalist Raza Rumi, a prominent critic of extremist groups, survived a Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) assassination attempt in Lahore March 28 that killed his driver.

And in January, three Express TV employees were killed in Karachi. Former TTP spokesman Ihsanullah Ihsan claimed responsibility on behalf of the TTP, even though he was fired last summer.

Threats curtail intellectual freedoms

Law enforcement agencies are guarding writers and publishers who are receiving threats from the militant groups, Karachi police spokesman Atiq Sheikh said.

“We arrested six militants belonging to the [LeJ] group who confessed to attacking [Rumi] and 16 other high-profile personalities,” Lahore Police Chief Chaudhry Shafiq Ahmed told Central Asia Online.

But intellectual freedoms are shrinking in Pakistan because of the militancy, writers and analysts say.

The country has very few publications, especially in Urdu, in which writers and scholars discuss the militancy from an anti-Taliban viewpoint, Khan Zaman Kakar, an Islamabad-based scholar, said.

“A section of Pakistani media glorifies Taliban militants and their brand of Islam,” Kakar said, adding that extremist elements are keenly aware of growing public and media criticism.

Militants have become likely to declare anyone who challenges the extremist ideology, or who dares to talk about a secular Pakistan, a traitor and to attack him, Rumi told Central Asia Online, calling the trend “a systematic purge” of intellectuals, writers and journalists.

“Debating religion and its misinterpretation by some religious elements is frowned upon,” he said. “Now dozens of militant groups are ready to ‘fix’ an errant writer or a speaker.”