Gandhi, Bhagat Singh 'virtually' inspire Pak

Pervez Musharraf may have muzzled Pakistani media, but the world of bloggers on the World Wide Web is still beyond the reach of the long arm of the law in Pakistan.

The biggest cyberspace hero for Pakistani bloggers is a man, the mention of whom is blacked out from Pakistani school curricula and whose name was used only in closed-door meetings of the Pakistani ultra-Left -- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

Although internet users face restrictions under Emergency, bloggers are having a free run denouncing the General for imposing Emergency and sundry other anti-democracy sins, while invoking Gandhi and Martin Luther King in order to steer the people's growing frustration on a non-violent path.

"Use you anger constructively," says a blogger, who claims to be based in Pakistan's Sindh province.

"Win over those who oppose peace to your way of thinking -- don't shout slogans in their faces! Learn from Martin Luther King and (Mahatama) Gandhi," says one posting on a blog called the "enlightened Pakistan co-operative".

In reply, the followers of Gandhi are posting study material on non-violent ways of protest for the benefit of common Pakistanis who seems to be caught between the armed-to-the-teeth jihadis and a despotic General.

Youtube, the free internet space for broadcasting, has expatriate Pakistanis protesting in small groups in Western countries. Choicest epithets are being used by the protesters against Musharraf.

On a sarcastic note, a blogger interprets Musharraf's recent move of imposing emergency as his sincere attempt in initiating a military-political partnership based on the Turkish form of government.

"The General's first public address on TV was in civilian clothes, which is his political face, and now onwards the presidents of Pakistan shall now be from the armed forces and the prime ministers from civil society," he says.

Other than Gandhi and Martin Luther, bloggers are invoking the poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the legendary Urdu poet of the Indian subcontinent, to raise a banner of revolt against the military regime.

Bhagat Singh, the militant revolutionary of the Indian freedom struggle, is another name that crops up in the angry messages hurtling across the World Wide Web against the Musharraf-ruled regime in Pakistan.

A student, whose poem "Call of defiance" is doing rounds of the internet, says the civilian uprising in Pakistan must be carried out in the name of Shaheed Bhagat Singh.