ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan’s electronic media regulator has issued a show-cause notice to Geo News after the broadcaster aired Indian songs and film clips during coverage of singer Asha Bhosle’s death, turning a brief obituary segment into a high-stakes compliance fight that could end in fines, suspension or even revocation of the channel’s license, April 13.
According to a report by Dawn Images, PEMRA says the broadcast amounted to “wilful defiance” of the Supreme Court’s 2018 ban on Indian content on Pakistani television. A separate report by Arab News said the regulator gave Geo 14 days to respond and summoned the network for an April 27 hearing, which is why the dispute has quickly grown from a content complaint into a real business and licensing risk.
Why the Asha Bhosle tribute triggered a high-stakes PEMRA response
The regulator’s complaint is not just symbolic. The public text of the PEMRA Ordinance, 2002 shows the authority can fine licensees after show-cause proceedings and, after notice and a personal hearing, suspend or revoke a broadcast license for violations of the ordinance, its rules or license conditions. In practical terms, the Geo notice puts the channel on the kind of enforcement track that operators try to avoid even when a final penalty is far from certain.
Geo News Managing Director Azhar Abbas has framed the segment as ordinary obituary journalism, arguing that broadcasters routinely revisit the work of major artists after their deaths. In a detailed account carried by The Indian Express, Abbas said Asha Bhosle’s career itself complicates any neat nationalist reading of the broadcast: he noted her admiration for Noor Jahan and her collaboration with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and argued that art should not become collateral damage in times of conflict.
That defense resonates because Bhosle was not a niche figure but one of the defining voices of South Asian popular music. As The Guardian’s obituary noted, she died in Mumbai on April 12 at 92 after a career that stretched across decades and genres, with thousands of recordings that travelled far beyond India’s borders. The cultural spillover was obvious in Pakistan as well, where entertainers publicly mourned her within hours of the news.
Asha Bhosle tribute row revives a much older content battle
The current dispute makes more sense when set against Pakistan’s stop-start policy on Indian programming. Reuters reported in 2016 that PEMRA announced a blanket ban on Indian television and radio content as bilateral tensions sharpened. Dawn then reported in 2017 that the Lahore High Court lifted the ban on Indian plays, calling a total prohibition unreasonable when objectionable material could instead be censored. But the Supreme Court reinstated the ban in 2018, restoring the legal line PEMRA is now invoking against Geo News.
That chronology is why this case matters beyond one channel and one singer. The Asha Bhosle tribute has become a test of whether Pakistani regulators will treat even short obituary material as prohibited foreign content, or whether there is still room for cultural reporting when the figure being remembered belongs to a shared South Asian canon. Until Geo files its reply and appears before PEMRA, the notice will hang over the network as both a legal warning and a signal of how rigidly the state now intends to police that boundary.
