sle. Let that sit for a moment. Asha Bhosle passed away last Sunday. When Geo reported her death and aired her songs, it was honouring her.

It was giving audiences context, memory and meaning. It was journalism. Pemra looked at that and decided it was a regulatory violation worth pursuing.

This is not regulation. It is cultural vandalism. Vandalism is not always loud. It does not always arrive with hammers and broken glass.

Sometimes it arrives with paperwork. With a show-cause notice. With the quiet, bureaucratic erasure of something that connected people across lines that institutions have spent generations deepening.

Art is often the last bridge left standing when everything else has collapsed. Pemra has chosen to burn it and call the act responsible governance. It is hiding behind the India content ban.

That ban was not born out of cultural conviction but geopolitical anger. It was a reaction to whatever idiocy was coming out of India. Emotion dressed up as law.

What Pemra banned was part of our own soul. There is an argument that gets deployed every time something like this happens. India bans Pakistani artists.

India pulls our films, our music, our cultural presence from its platforms. Why should we be any different? This is not an argument.

It is a surrender. If your benchmark for national policy is matching the worst behaviour of your rival, you have already conceded the moral ground. Tit for tat is not a strategy.

It is a reflex. And reflexes require no thought. The moment you say, we will do what they do, you have handed them the power to define you.

You become a mirror of your enemy’s worst instincts rather than a country capable of charting its own course. Banning Asha Bhosle’s songs does not make Pakistan stronger. It does not improve a single life, resolve a single dispute, or advance a single national interest.

She was not an Indian artist — she called Noor Jahan her elder sister, sang with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and gave voice to our poets, like Nasir Kazmi. She was subcontinental. What Pemra banned was part of our own soul.

Pemra’s logic, if you can call it that, is that Indian content threatens our identity and values. That airing Indian songs during an obituary report is somehow cultural subversion. That Pakistanis must be protected from a woman who spent 70 years singing.

This is the same Pemra that issued a show-cause notice recently to Channel 24 — not for anything dangerous, but because the morning show host’s husband lifted her over his shoulder in what she described as a playful moment. Pemra called it a code of conduct violation, summoned the channel, and congratulated itself on protecting the nation from a married couple being affectionate on TV. If a couple’s playful moment and a 92-year-old singer’s voice are both national security concerns, we need to ask who is doing the threatening — the content or the regulator.

The subcontinent’s musical heritage does not stop at Wagah. It never did. No notice from Pemra will change that. All it does is remind us how small the regulator’s imagination is.

Regulation exists to protect the public, not to manage the feelings of the state. When used to sil­ence music, to issue notices against me­­mory and melody, to flag affection and songs as threats, it has lost its way. It has become the thing it was suppo­sed to prevent: an arbitrary exercise of power against the people it claims to serve.

And the tragedy is the timing. Last week, Pakistanis allowed themselves something rare: uncomplicated pride. For once, the joke was not on us.

For once we were the adults in the room. And then Pemra reminded us which room we actually live in. That is the gap Pakistan has to close.

Not the gap between Washington and Tehran, but the one between the country we are capable of being on the world stage and the country we settle for at home. You cannot host peace talks in the morning, ban a dead woman’s songs in the afternoon, lock up a popular leader at night and expect the world — or your own people — not to notice. Pakistan does not need the world’s applause.

It needs to grow up for itself. That means dismantling the petty, fearful instincts that Pemra represents — an institution that has made a career out of silence — not only when the cameras are on, but especially when they are not. The writer is a former journalism instructor. X: @LedeingLady Published in Dawn, April 19th, 2026