THE first attack took place on March 28 in Lahore. It was a Friday evening when the car of Raza Rumi, a wellknown journalist and public figure, was subjected to a volley of bullets. The attack had the usual ingredients: surprise, armed assailants, bullets, and death.

Mr Rumi was lucky; he escaped unhurt. His driver was injured and ultimately died. The chauffeuring profession, in contemporary Pakistan, is a deadly one. The moments after the attack were harrowing as a stunned Mr Rumi pleaded with strangers for help. The assailants, of course, had disappeared in the uncertain air of the Lahore evening, like so many of them so many times before. Raza Rumi said on Twitter: `Was fired at near Raja Market. My driver is wounded. I was dreading the day.

The second attack took place on April 19 in Karachi, a city where days and nights know no distinctions in the frequency of death`s dealings. It was afternoon and Hamid Mir, the host of `Capital Talk` on the Geo television network, had just arrived in the city and was on his way to a television studio. Sharea Faisal, named after the Saudi king who has bestowed so much on this nation of poor Muslims, must have been crowded.

Again there was a surreptitious encircling, a volley of gunfire. Unlike Raza Rumi, Hamid Mir was not lucky. The attack left his body riddled with bullets, his life dangling by a thread. He was rushed to the Agha Khan Hospital, where his luck improved; emergency surgery excised some of the bullets, and Hamid Mir lives today.

Two journalists, one on Pakistan`s tiny and beleaguered `left` and another on Pakistan`s populist `right` were hence made public examples of what a country beset with myriad enemies can inflict on its public figures. The aftermath of the two attacks is as well known as their details.In the days that followed the attack on Rumi, the many mantras of outrage were duly mouthed, allegiances declared, and the dark shadows of extremism that envelop the country condemned. The aftermath of the attack on Hamid Mir, whose right of centre political positions hold star status on Geo television, was different. Instead of the usual recipes of retreat beforesudden and deadly assault, Mir`s family and then Mir himself, named the ISI, or to be specific `the ISI within the ISI,` as involved in the attack.

Within days, a complaint had been lodged against the television station through Pemra, the electronic media regulatory body. Geo television disappeared from the air in certain areas. The debate moved from attacks on journalists to the always tense civil-military relations in the country.

This last fact is another tragedy of the two attacks. In the global media, now, the two men both attacked and both cornered seem to be vying for the greater share of a confused public`s sympathy and allegiance. The political divide that separates them has never been a greater abyss.

In it lays the mess of a polarised political discourse where all allegiances are questionable, and where concepts of nationalism and patriotism are handmaidens to personal ambition and ideological constriction.

Simply put, the attacks on two men, on opposite sides of the spectrum, required each to come to the other`s aid and defence, for a press to unite under the umbrellas of freedom, and for people to gather together on the shaky platform of principle.

It is not that Hamid Mir and Raza Rumi have not condemned the attacks on each other; they have. It is just that the rhetoric and the debate following the two attacks have done little to further the idea that a principle and a profession and not a particular channel or a particular political ideology is at stake.

The battle lines that have emerged have hence become murky. Is this an issue of patriotism and not critiquing various covert arms of the Pakistani military, or an issue of an attack on public figures with controversial opinions? The presence of a multitude of enemies in every hue and shade and colour, institutional and otherwise, associated with the state and not has consequently meant an end to any moral clarity on the issue.

Is it the attacks themselves on which we want investigation, clarification, justice and restitution, or are we as a nation primarily concerned with the controversies that are birthed in their wake? Must there be a choice between condemning militarism and extremism, a choice between which of the two victims was more wronged, more persecuted, more hurt by the unjust vagaries of war? In a situation in which both Raza Rumi and Hamid Mir have seen their lives dangle before them, it feels wrong to place any blame on them. Yet those who have suffered such have the most power and the most legitimacy to speak against what has attacked them. If Mir and Rumi could unite and identify as journalists first as men who have something to say and stand for the freedom to say it for them and for the many others who seek to emulate them, the debate can be changed. This requires a knowing discarding of the narratives of victimisation, an end to the dirges of persecution, a deliberate dislocation of political ideology in favour of professional responsibility something that has not so far been possible in Pakistan. m The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

rafia.zakaria@gmail.com