When they are not in power, they want no restrictions on media. But when they take charge, they make efforts to muzzle electronic, print and social media. That is the PML-N for you once again – a supposedly democratic party that has one brother as the party president and another as the country’s prime minister.

So far, the PML-N has used the position of deputy prime minister to accommodate a close relative and selected its president’s daughter to lead the largest province of the country, and it now wants to strangulate dissent under the garb of a crackdown on ‘defamation’. When out of power, the PML-N campaigned for free media. While in power, it has ignored media professionals and human rights activists demanding free media. Not that the PTI performed any better on this front, but the record of the PML-N is as bad as its adversaries.

These are questions to do with ethics and values in a society full of people with diverse views. A society needs to tackle the difference between particulars and universals skilfully. The Punjab Defamation Bill 2024 is perhaps the worst example of how the PML-N leadership is unable to comprehend the basic principle of running a society – that a government cannot unilaterally define ‘ethics’ and ‘values’; in a diverse society, different opinions need protection, and that includes something which one party may consider defamatory. The more you get offended in the name of defamation, the more vulnerable you appear.

The way the PML-N government in Punjab has tried to shun all dissent smacks of an extremely vulnerable dispensation that is tightening the noose around the media. The PTI government was notorious for bulldozing laws through presidential ordinances, and now the PML-N is driving an entire provincial assembly to enact laws that will ultimately haunt its own members.

When a party’s pre-election conduct signals any........

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