2025 - Page 18 of 69 - Index on Censorship

Police in Islamabad raid the press club in an escalation of Pakistan’s attack on the media

24 Oct 2025 | Asia and Pacific, News, Pakistan

Inside the National Press Club (NPC) of Islamabad stands a column topped with a hand cast in iron and holding a pen, which shows the concept of a free press. But unfortunately, realities on the ground are quite different in the capital, let alone other parts of Pakistan. The proof: On 2 October 2025, the police carried out a raid at the NPC and assaulted journalists present inside the press club.

Journalists’ unions and human rights bodies have condemned the assault by the Islamabad police in the strongest terms with the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) demanding an immediate inquiry and saying that those responsible should be brought to book.

During my visit to the press club this month, I met journalists, photographers, and cameramen who were assaulted by the police. One of them was Mohammad Shezad. According to him, he was beaten up by officers carrying out the raid.

“The cops grabbed me by my shirt,” he told Index on Censorship. “As I resisted, they ripped my shirt across the back.”

Dawn, Pakistan’s largest English-language daily broadsheet, condemned the raid the very next day in an editorial, calling it “a trend that one associates with authoritarian regimes, which crush protest and cannot tolerate even peaceful dissent”.

“On that very day, there were three demonstrations at the press club,” recalled Azhar Jatoi, the president of the NPC, during an interview with Index. “The JKJAAC (Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee) had issued a call for a demonstration at the press club, and they were surrounded by the police as soon as they started demonstrating.”

The JKJAAC is an alliance demanding civil liberties and political rights in the Kashmir region in Pakistan, an end to special privileges for government officials, the restoration of student unions, access to free and quality healthcare and education, among other things.

The organisation had engaged in talks with the government which failed, and that is why they called for a region-wide strike on 29 September. In the lead up to the strike, the government shut down all mobile, landline and internet services in the region, but unfortunately, the protests soon turned violent. According to a report by Reuters, eight were killed in the protests.

As a result, the JKJAAC protestors went to demonstrate outside the National Press Club in Islamabad, so their demonstrations could be peacefully recorded.

According to Jatoi, the police started assaulting the journalists to stop them reporting on how the protesters were being beaten and dragged away.

Rashed Ahmad, who works at the press club, said while talking to Index that he too was beaten up by the police when he wanted to close the gate.

Most of the journalists present at the NPC complained about the police raid, calling it an attack against the press freedom in Pakistan. One of them was Ishaque Chaudry, a senior journalist in Islamabad who said that there had been attacks on the press club before.

“This is not the first time that the journalists have been assaulted at the press club. In the past, these kinds of incidents have taken place too,” he told Index. He added that these attacks were happening when Pakistan had a democratic government, and not when the country had been under military rule.

Other journalists echoed the same claims. Afzal Butt, the president of PFUJ (Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists), termed the assault “one of the darkest days” in Pakistan while talking about the press club raid.

It is interesting to note that Islamabad used to be a safe place for journalists. But over the last few years, it has become unsafe. According to an annual press freedom report by Freedom Network, Islamabad was termed in 2024 as the “second most dangerous place to practise journalism” in the country with a quarter of all attacks on journalists happening in the capital.

This is not something surprising. The most senior journalists, known nationally in the country, have been attacked in Islamabad for years. In 2017, a senior investigative journalist of The News Ahmed Noorani was assaulted by knife-wielding assailants along with his driver in Islamabad. Due to the persistent threats to his life, he fled the country.

In 2021, prominent Pakistani journalist Asad Toor was assaulted by three unidentified men who broke into his apartment in Islamabad. In the same year, senior journalist Absar Alam too was shot and injured in an attack in Islamabad.

The list of assaults against journalists in Islamabad goes on. But the reporters this time around were lucky enough to survive. They are lucky in the sense that Pakistan is still one the deadliest countries for journalists to work in the world according to the latest figures from Reporters without Borders. At least 138 journalists have been killed in the country since 1990.

Instead of protecting journalists, government-sponsored advertisements appeared in media on the same day as the police carried out the raid on the press club, portraying journalists, freelancers, and others as anti-state.

Farooq Sulehria, a teacher at Beaconhouse National University in Lahore and author of the books on the media in Pakistan, told Index that the raid on the press club was part of “a creeping authoritarianism in Pakistan”.

He further explained that by creeping authoritarianism he meant the increasing repression of the state in Pakistan, which was affecting aspects of life where it was not present before. “For instance, the police carried out a raid inside the press club in Islamabad which people could hardly think that could happen,” he said.

In his concluding remarks, journalist Ishaque Chaurdy comes up with a disconcerting view while talking about police raid at the club: “If this is the case in the capital for journalists, then the situation for journalists is obviously quite worse than we can imagine in rest of Pakistan.”

Reports of Urdu’s death are greatly exaggerated

24 Oct 2025 | Asia and Pacific, India, News, Volume 54.03 Autumn 2025

This article first appeared in Volume 54, Issue 3 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled Truth, trust and tricksters: Free expression in the age of AI, published on 30 September 2025. Read more about the issue here.

The rickshaw raced through the byways of old Delhi. My heart leaped with each serpentine turn, fearful of a crash in the cramped lanes. But I survived the kashmakash¹, the rickshaw eventually depositing me at the endpoint of my pilgrimage: the erstwhile home of poet Mirza Ghalib, one of the greatest Urdu writers of the 19th century.

My ride, laced with a sense of impending doom, had uncanny parallels with the position of the Urdu language in India: dodging falls, scarred by detractors, warding off attempts to side-line it. Amidst the vast linguistic diversity of the subcontinent.

Urdu has survived each time, cared for not only by its native speakers, but also by a multitude who have embraced it as their own. It sometimes feels like there is someone, somewhere, watching Urdu and urging it to thrive. It could be the ghost of Ghalib, who wrote in a famous, self-referential poem:

huī muddat ki ‘ġhālib’ mar gayā par yaad aatā hai

vo har ik baat par kahnā ki yuuñ hotā to kyā hotā

(Though ages he’s been dead Ghalib is still thought of today. At every trice, to ask what would be, if it were this way.)

But let us set poetic musings aside for the moment, and redirect our attention towards a recent judgment by India’s supreme court, which stated: “Language is not religion. Language does not even represent religion. Language belongs to a community, to a region, to people; and not to a religion. Language is culture. Language is the yardstick to measure the civilisational march of a community and its people. So in the case of Urdu, which is the finest specimen of Ganga-Jamuni tahzib², or the Hindustani tahzib, which is the composite cultural ethos of the plains of northern and central India.”

This judgement – in a case concerning Urdu-language usage on the signage of a new municipal building in Akola – advocated respect for the linguistic diversity of the country, and affirmed the Indian origins of the Urdu language.

Judgements in this vein are significant, aligning as they do with India’s constitutional ethos of pluralism. Even in India’s present socio-political climate where democratic values are receding and communal polarisation is commonplace, Urdu is gaining popularity. The 100-rupee note bears the legend “One Hundred Rupees” – in English, Urdu and fifteen other vernacular languages. The irony is that the Hindi and Urdu both read the same: ek saou rupaya.

The same but different

Post-partition, the newly formed nations of India and Pakistan chose Hindi and Urdu respectively as their official languages. While the lingua franca in the two countries has been promoted carefully, the authorities have consistently reminded the polity that Hindi and Urdu are distinctly different from each other, and thus incomprehensible to the non-native speaker. But Urdu speakers in Pakistan watch Hindi movies, and Hindi speakers in India savour ghazals³ often written in Urdu. The supposed incomprehensibility does not pose a challenge, it seems. With this clear evidence of mutual intelligibility, might one suppose that Hindi and Urdu are “sisters”? Given the linguistic and literary history of both, such claims seem reasonable.

Azra Naqvi, the well-known Urdu poet and translator told Index: “No language is created in a single moment or at a specific place. It evolves gradually, shaped by history, culture, and human interaction, thus the evolution of the Urdu language has been a fascinating process, with both the Deccan [the plain in the south of India] and north India playing important roles.” Naqvi continued: “Urdu is a shining example of India’s Ganga-Jamuni culture [i.e., relating to the names of the River Ganga and Yamuna], the syncretic tradition that emerged from centuries of cultural exchange between Hindus and Muslims.”

A similar point was made by Professor Mehr Afsan Farooqi, who teaches Urdu and South Asian Literature at the University of Virginia. She told Index: “The Urdu language was born in India. It is an Indian language, known as Hindi until the time the language was split in the name of script in the early 20th century. Urdu-Hindi have their base in khari boli, the dialect spoken in the area around Delhi in the western part of Uttar Pradesh. This dialect’s grammar is the same, the vocabulary is mutually intelligible in the common register or bolchal⁴, as we say. The high register of Urdu-Hindi was used for poetry mostly of the ghazal. On the other hand, braj bhasha⁵ was the language of poetry for the so-called Hindi register. The literary history of Urdu-Hindi is intertwined and can only be separated artificially.”

It is hardly a surprise that detractors of Urdu in the past – read, amongst others, the British colonisers – tried to corner Urdu by adding notions of religiosity to the language.

“We fought our freedom movement in Urdu, how can it be forgotten?” said the historian Rana Safvi. “It is after 1857 [that] the language was addressed as ‘Urdu’. However it can be traced way back to the 13th century to the times of Amir Khusraw, the legendary poet and Sufi.”

The language of the exalted

Another change evolved in the late 18th century, during the reign of Mohammed Shah, she continued. “When the poets of the court started writing in Hindi instead of Persian, it [Urdu] was addressed as Jaban -e-Urdu-e Maula (the language of the exalted).”

“Exalted” is an apposite description for Urdu. Only this seems sufficient to explain its survival despite allegations of being a “foreign language”, or it being referred to pejoratively as “the language of Muslims”.

The reality today, though, is not all bad, and the bright lamp of Urdu is well lit. New publications based on works of Mirza Ghalib and his contemporaries stand as testament to this, as does the nurturing of Urdu literature and language via organisations like the Rekhta Foundation established in 2013, which is a non-profit social impact organisation engaged with promoting the language and literature of the Indian subcontinent.

However, Urdu’s principal saviour is Bollywood. The tryst between Urdu and India’s expansive film industry, orchestrated via the latter’s vast repository of film music, is incomparable. Bollywood’s links with Urdu are as old as the industry itself, and just as durable. Today, millennials and Gen Z are also smitten by Urdu.

“The Urdu register has gained popularity among the millennials and Gen Z in India because the younger people usually go against ‘rightist’ trend. It is therefore ‘cool’ to be spouting Urdu poetry and talking with the right accent,” a sceptical Farooqi told Index. “This trend is not very deep as far social media trends go. It can be replaced with something ‘new’ tomorrow.” Farooqi’s book Ghalib: A Wilderness at My Doorstep: A Critical Biography has, however, been well received by the contemporary readers reflecting the enduring bond with Urdu in India.

Farooqi’s criticism though is pertinent. The “cool” trend she described was evident in a recent social media fad in India where thousands of users shared the text of Pakistani author Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poem Hum Dekhenge (We Shall See). Written in 1979 as an indictment of the authoritarian rule of General Zia-ul-Haq in Pakistan, it has been co-opted over the years as an anthem of resistance across both countries. There is, though, another aspect of this somewhat spontaneous Urdu love. Emerging from a more informed interest in Urdu, this is reflected in unprecedented popularity of Jashn-e-Rekhta, the world’s largest Urdu language literary festival, held annually in New Delhi. Naqvi is closely involved with rekhta.org a more recent initiative of the foundation which has become a lifeline for students, scholars and lovers of Urdu worldwide. Originally established as a website for presenting Urdu poetry in Urdu, Hindi and Roman scripts, Rekhta has grown into the world’s largest digital repository of Urdu literature. The website features over 100,000 works by more than 4,000 poets, a vast ebook library, and a trilingual online dictionary.

Still, do initiatives like this mean Urdu will continue to live, despite facing intermittent attacks? The simple answer is “yes”. Nomaan Shauq, another eminent Urdu poet told Index: “Urdu has thrived due to its rich literary tradition, adaptability, and the deep emotional connection it fosters with its speakers. Its strength lies in its ability to express complex emotions and ideas, especially through poetry, which has sustained it through challenges.”

Safvi, the historian, echoed this sentiment: “Urdu can never die, it’s the language of love and poetry.” Farooqi, for her part, is more pragmatic: “Urdu’s strength lies in its hybridity. Languages survive when they are adaptable.” Nothing serves this adaptability better than Bollywood, which has silently walked the path of what Naqvi calls “the Urdu tradition”. She said: “In this way, Urdu has quietly seeped into the cultural fabric of India – a language of romance, resistance and refinement.”

If that that were not enough, the collective usage of Urdu, in the form of quotes from poetry, literature and ghazals by millions via social media posts, have unlocked a treasure trove. Urdu, truly, is a people’s language and something that belongs to the people cannot be curbed.

Footnotes

Kashmakash is a word in Urdu which captures the feeling of being caught in a difficult situation with no easy answers, either a dilemma or perplexity
Politeness, etiquette manners that define a cultured and sophisticated way of life
Also spelt as gazal consisting of couplets, the second part of which are in rhyme
Bolchal, here, can be best translated as common parlance
A western dialect of Hindi spoken in western Uttar Pradesh

North Korea fears the Squid Game effect

23 Oct 2025 | Asia and Pacific, News, North Korea, Volume 54.03 Autumn 2025

Kim Jong Un, supreme leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea – North Korea to you and me – is more afraid of Korean television drama series than he is of foreign attacks. This, amongst other things, is what defector Yuna Jung told Index about the secretive dictatorship when we met in London in June.

Index met with Jung, and with two other North Koreans who live in South Korea, at Kingston University. The three were visiting the UK as part of a speaking tour organised by Freedom Speakers International (FSI). Founded in 2013 as Teach North Korean Refugees, FSI empowers North Korean refugees to engage with the international community.

The three women who spoke with Index all wanted to talk about life in the north, how their eyes were opened through television – specifically South Korean K-dramas, as they are called – and about the hopes they have for change in their native country.

Jung, who defected from North Korea in 2006, decided to leave after K-drama showed her a different world and way of life. Sujin Kim, who defected in 2003 didn’t have enough to eat and was malnourished, and saw through smuggled dramas how different life in South Korea was. Riha Kim, a more recent defector, became disillusioned with the regime through her work as a doctor, and fled to the south in 2015.

Jung told Index that she encountered K-dramas for the first time when a classmate invited her to watch a show, romantic melodrama Autumn In My Heart, which had been smuggled into the country.

“My father had money and power, but it was forbidden. It could kill you,” Jung told Index. “But I believed my father would rescue me. So, I watched it.”

She had only intended to watch a single episode. But she couldn’t stop, and soon, she had binged the entire series. Jung recalled that people who had seen the show would sing its theme song among themselves.

“It just opened my eyes and then woke me up,” she said.

And so she fled, not telling anyone in advance.

Leaving North Korea was at that time a difficult and dangerous process, as Barbara Demick detailed in her 2009 book Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea. Defectors had to cross over into China and then obtain false passports to go from China to South Korea. Being caught by the Chinese police meant being sent back to North Korea to face months or even years in a labour camp. Most people who attempted it had money and family networks abroad to help them.

The power of K-drama

When Sujin Kim lived in North Korea, she too managed to watch K-dramas smuggled into the country. Before pressing “play”, she would cover the windows and lock the doors; she watched shows with the sound muted, to hide what she was doing. Kim was shocked by the freedom exhibited in the programmes.
Some people had access through other routes, such as television sets that could be tuned to Chinese TV.

However, Jung explained, this required a huge aerial, which cost money. The authorities soon worked out what was going on because even watching Chinese TV was forbidden.

Seeing representations of life in South Korea through K-dramas prompted Sujin Kim to question the North Korean regime. When her mother started to push her into marrying an older man, she decided that it was time for her to leave. Kim didn’t want to have children born into the same situation as her, without enough to eat. She wanted to raise children in the South Korea that she had seen on television.

She succeeded in escaping and eventually married a South Korean with whom she has had two children. But even now, years later, she still struggles when asked for her opinion. After years of being told to stay silent, voicing her thoughts does not come naturally.

Kim and Jung fled North Korea more than a decade ago. Thanks to the reach of popular streaming services, the global popularity of K-drama has sharply risen since then, even though foreign audiences are only seeing a small segment of the shows created. In 2016, Netflix started investing in Korean productions. The violent drama Squid Game, where desperate people are lured into participating in – literally – murderous competitions, became a global phenomenon in 2021. Other Korean shows that have found international audiences include Celebrity, a thriller-romance about wealth and status; All Of Us Are Dead (below), a high school drama featuring a zombie apocalypse; and Business Proposal, an office romance.

Required watching

But K-drama hits differently in North Korea compared to the rest of the world, wielding huge influence over the way people think. Characters in these shows are not struggling to find enough food to eat, they can speak freely and are allowed to declare their love for people other than Kim Jong Un.

When the Unification Media Group (UMG), a non-profit media consortium based in Seoul, asked a group of 50 defectors in 2022 whether they had watched foreign media before leaving North Korea, 98% of respondents answered in the affirmative – up from 91% in 2019. 96% of the respondents said that they had watched South Korean drama. Some of the most popular shows were Squid Game, Penthouse, and Crash Landing On You, the last featuring a South Korean heiress stranded in the north.

There are similar parallels in recent history. Once, the divide between East and West Germany was compared to that of the two Koreas. While television programming in East Germany focused on furthering socialist politics, people were also tuning into West German TV. Many were influenced by this external media which some researchers believe hastened the fall of the Berlin Wall and German re-unification. In Romania in the 1980s, the communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu, a fan of the US TV series Dallas, allowed it to be shown on television, hoping it would demonstrate the evils of capitalism. Instead, the soap opera about oil barons and their families had the opposite effect, fuelling discontent with his regime.

K-drama inspired Jung to leave North Korea; today, she’s a popular television figure in South Korea herself, regularly appearing on Now on My Way to Meet You, a talk show featuring North Korean refugees.

One day, Jung Il Young, the singer of Autumn In My Heart’s main theme song, came on the show. Recollections of the song, and what it represented to them, brought North Koreans in the studio to tears.

Still. The supreme leader of North Korea fearing South Korean television? Quite plausible, it seems. As Jung told Index, his fear of K-drama comes from the concern that it will change people’s minds, as it did in her case. It is changing the younger generation, and it is becoming more difficult to brainwash them – and he knows this.

Risky viewing habits

As one can surmise from the subterfuge involved in accessing K-drama, watching these shows in North Korea is illegal. More and more people are taking this risk, though. According to the UMG research, it is making those who do curious about South Korean culture.

In November 2021, Radio Free Asia reported that a man who smuggled copies of Squid Game into North Korea for sale had been sentenced to death, after seven high school students were caught watching a copy of the show that he had sold to them. The student who purchased the show – stored on a USB stick – was sentenced to life imprisonment, and the other six were sentenced to five years of hard labour. Teachers and school administrators were fired and some exiled to remote areas.

Then in July 2024, South Korean news outlets claimed that the north had publicly executed 30 teenagers for watching K-dramas. This report could not be independently verified, however, and has been treated with scepticism by some experts.

Accurate or not, defectors do confirm that the crackdown on watching foreign media has indeed become harsher since 2020, when the Law on Rejecting Reactionary Thought and Culture was introduced. The punishment for viewing or distributing foreign films now is, in fact, execution. In the UMG survey, respondents were asked whether they knew of anyone around them being punished for consuming foreign radio or video content. Out of 50 respondents, 44 said “Yes”. The majority of those punished had been for watching videos.

Sujin Kim last spoke with her family in North Korea around three years ago. She tried to arrange for them to be smuggled out but failed. For a while, she was able to communicate with her family by letter, sent through brokers. A photograph served as proof that the letter had arrived, and a reply would be sent back. But the brokers on both sides of the China-North Korea border were captured by their respective governments, she told Index, and she has now lost her method of communication.

Escaping North Korea has become more difficult since the complete closure of the border in 2020 as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. And stories of escapes have been few and far between. Though while still low, numbers have just started to rise again.

What the K-dramas give their viewers in North Korea is a sense of what life is like in the south and what is allowed, even if some of it is exaggerated – or, in the case of Squid Game, terrifying. When it comes to taking down a dictator like Kim Jong Un, perhaps the K-drama is mightier than the nuclear weapon.

North Korea’s silenced AIDS patients

For Riha Kim, the third defector who spoke with Index, the decision to leave North Korea in 2015 came from a deeply traumatic experience. Working as a doctor focusing on treating HIV/AIDS, she quickly became disillusioned with the country’s healthcare provision

Riha Kim worked as a doctor treating patients with HIV and AIDS which North Korea's leader says do not exist. Photo: Katie Dancey-Downs

Speaking through a translator, Riha Kim told Index that UN sanctions have severely restricted the availability of medical supplies; patients had to buy their own medicine from the black market and then take them to the hospital to be used for their treatment.

Beyond this desperate situation, Kim witnessed a silencing of doctors and patients.

“Patients are definitely isolated if they’ve got AIDS. Nobody is in communication,” she told Index. She explained that if she, as a doctor, said anything about an HIV outbreak, or told anyone about what was happening to patients, she could go to prison.

North Korea has claimed in the past to be AIDS-free – a claim which it reasserted at a World AIDS Day celebration in 2018. According to Science magazine a team of researchers from the USA and North Korea submitted a report to the preprint server medRxiv (an archive of reports from the medical field that are unpublished and not yet peer-reviewed) claiming the truth was quite the opposite. The country actually had 8,362 HIV-positive cases in 2018, and infections were surging.

What Kim saw was a country denying that there was a problem.

As part of her job, she checked women repatriated from China, where they are considered as illegal immigrants and are subjected to forced deportation back to North Korea. According to a recent UN report, returnees are subject to inhuman treatment and punishment including “imprisonment, execution, torture, arbitrary detention, deliberate starvation, illegal cavity searches, forced abortions and other sexual violence.”

One woman under Kim’s care, who had a six-year-old daughter, was found to be suffering from AIDS. She was immediately separated from her child, who was sent to an orphanage. Even though she tried to bribe a security guard to see her daughter, she was not allowed to. Kim described how, because the woman had left North Korea and contracted the disease in an outside country, the state left her to die without treatment.

Before the woman died, she asked Kim to take care of her daughter. Kim went around every orphanage, looking for the girl. Eventually, one orphanage claimed to be hosting a child who didn’t know her name. Kim asked to see her, knowing she would remember the child’s face.

“It was right, she was the daughter, but she had no hair,” she said, explaining that outbreaks of head lice were rampant in orphanages. Because of her traumatic experiences, the girl was not able to speak.

Kim tried to take care of the girl, visiting her regularly until the orphanage stopped her from doing so, telling her that the girl had been adopted. She did not believe them, and to this day does not know what happened to the girl.

“I saw that it was the government separating the family. This was the moment I had no hope”, she said. She had lost trust in the North Korean regime.

Even though telling the story left her visibly upset, she was adamant that the world should know that North Korea has AIDS patients.

When Kim left North Korea, alone, she left a simple note. Later, she smuggled her family out of the country.

Truth, trust & tricksters: Free expression in the age of AI

22 Oct 2025 | Magazine, Magazine Editions, Volume 54.03 Autumn 2025

It is difficult to spend a day without using artificial intelligence. Whether we look up a fact on Google or use our car’s navigation system, AI is helping to guide us. AI is not human, but is increasingly taking on human characteristics. Want to write a five-year strategy for work? AI can give you the structure. A text to the lover you’re breaking up with, ChatGPT is on hand with the perfect choice of words. Even as I compose this editor’s letter in a Word document, the sinisterly named Copilot – Microsoft’s AI assistant – is hovering in the margin with the tantalising offer that it could do a better job.

So what does it all mean for free expression? We asked a range of writers to explore themes around censorship and AI for this latest issue, and the result is fascinating. Kate Devlin delves into griefbots which are essentially deepfakes of dead people – often with all their unpleasant characteristics removed.

Innocent enough but in the wrong hands they are pernicious. A country’s political hero can be resurrected to encourage causes they would have disavowed were they alive. Ruth Green looks at whether AI has free speech.

In a recent US lawsuit, the owner of a chatbot which had been talking to a teenager, in a sexualised way, before he killed himself, argued that the bot’s communications were covered by the First Amendment. Luckily the judge threw the case out.

Meanwhile Timandra Harkness examines how AI can trawl social media to discover every word you’ve ever written.