Aboard the Democracy Train

by Nafisa Hoodbhoy

  Benazir Bhutto relied much more on the carrot than did Nawaz Sharif. She had left her gregarious husband, Asif Zardari – well built with a moustache, flashing white teeth and a vibrant, hearty laugh – to ooze charm on journalists.

  I first met Asif Zardari in early 1992 when he was brought as an accused to the Special Courts in Karachi. As my colleague – journalist, Mazhar Abbas – introduced me, I was struck by the grin that Zardari wore, even under such difficult circumstances. He told me that whilst in prison, he had followed the uproar about the attack on me in the newspapers.

  Accustomed to Benazir’s formal personality, I was thrown off guard as he gushed: “Where have you been all this time? How come it’s taken you all this time to discover my good looks?”

  I had heard stories about Zardari’s ways with women and took it in good humor. He exuded an energy and affability that had earned him the title “a friend of friends.” Even when I visited him in prison, where he showed me marks of torture on his tongue, he seemed in control and able to manipulate the situation in his favor.

  But while Zardari’s hobnobbing with journalists may have wiped some of the sting, he could not stop the criticism he faced in the open press. His penchant for taking kick backs from business entrepreneurs had earned him the nick name, “Mr Ten Per cent,” a reputation that stuck as hard as his last name. The English language press cleverly used Asif Zardari’s first and last initials to coin the inimitable term “A to Z is corrupt” – meaning that everyone is corrupt in Pakistan.

  Even while Benazir was alive, she couldn’t defend Asif from media criticism. Then, as I wrote critical reports about the PPP in Dawn, her spokespersons – and at times even Benazir personally – defended her party.

  On the other hand, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif ensured good publicity through his “helicopter group” of pet photographers and embedded journalists. In 1992, when floods hit Sindh, Sharif was provided photo opportunities of him wading knee-deep in waters to publicize his “love” for the affected villagers.

  It was under Sharif that the term “envelope journalism” was coined with reference to the wads of rupee notes that his party, the Pakistan Muslim League (N – “Nawaz”) reportedly doled out to journalists at their press conferences. My contacts in Lahore told me this was a Punjab-based strategy, from whence Sharif drew his power.

  1991: A Year of Living Dangerously

  Unfortunately for the military and their protégé, Nawaz Sharif, 1991 was a period of glasnost for the press. Gen. Zia ul Haq’s plane crash had ended the era of flogging and imprisonment of journalists and left them in a combative mood. As the media restrictions eased, a glut of cheap Urdu, Sindhi and English newspapers flooded the market and their circulation stabilized according to the forces of supply and demand.

  In this back drop, Chief Minister Jam Sadiq Ali rode against the current when he used the parliament to abuse the former woman prime minister, her husband and their party. Asif Zardari – who rose to become Pakistan’s president – was Jam’s favorite whipping boy during the 1990s. The chief minister also used colorful language against Benazir’s party men, painting them as twits and minions and slandering them by name to make them lose face before the public.

  For me, it became an art form to recreate the drama enacted in the Sindh Assembly between the Jam government and the PPP opposition leaders. My coverage of the PPP leader of the opposition in the Sindh Assembly, Nisar Ahmed Khuhro – with his darting eyes and quick wit – appeared each morning on the front pages of Dawn. Being a faithful narration of parliamentary proceedings, the Sindh Press Information Department could hardly refute my reports. Unfortunately for Jam, his vitriolic rambling and Khuhro’s eloquence would only raise the PPP’s esteem nationwide.

  At the same time, I used my position as an independent journalist to go behind the scenes and investigate the reign of terror that the Jam government had unleashed in interior Sindh.

  My colleagues in the Urdu and Sindhi newspapers envied the fact that we in the English language newspapers enjoyed an uncensored freedom that was unimaginable in the vernacular press. English education is confined to the well-educated, mostly privileged class and it was this elite readership that was permitted to follow the nuances. That enabled English language editors and publishers to perform a dance with the government to get newsprint and advertising without sacrificing too much news coverage.

  A newspaper colleague from an Urdu newspaper told me, by way of a backhanded compliment: “If what you write in English is translated into Urdu, it will drive people mad.”

  Taking advantage of my freedom, I zeroed in on the activities of the son-in-law of the President of Pakistan, Ghulam Ishaq Khan who then served as advisor to the chief minister. He was Irfanullah Marwat, the burly muscle man responsible for the knitty gritty directives issued to the Crime Investigation Agency (CIA) to kidnap Benazir’s party men and force them to change their loyalties.

  In early 1991, I was inside the Sindh Assembly covering the feisty PML (N)-PPP exchanges, when I heard that Marwat had smuggled a PPP member of parliament into his chamber. It raised a red flag among us journalists: We suspected that Benazir’s party man was about to be “broken” and forced to switch his loyalties to support Jam’s PML (N) government. A colleague had already noted the number plate on Marwat’s vehicle from whence the PPP member had emerged.

  Together with my male journalist colleagues from the emerging rival newspaper, The News and Sindhi newspapers, we sped to the advisor’s office – hoping to catch him red-handed. I took the lead and knocked on Marwat’s office in the grand assembly quarters. The tall, hefty Pashtun came out and glared at us, arms akimbo.

  I stood my ground: a young woman, surrounded by her male colleagues, confronting the suspected mastermind of criminal activities in Sindh. The president’s son-in-law had been named by my sources as organizing the kidnapping of political opponents. Still, the backing from my influential newspaper and my journalist friends gave me courage. “We’ve heard that you’ve brought a PPP member to your chamber and want to check if he’s inside,” I told the advisor to the chief minister.

  His look turned icy. Then, speaking to me directly, he took a step back and half closed the door of his chamber with the words, “You may not come in.”

  With my press colleagues around me, I responded with aplomb, “We will write that you stopped us from checking for ourselves.”

  “Don’t threaten me Bibi [young woman],” Marwat snapped.

  When Marwat confronted me, he didn’t realize that my fellow journalists were listening. One of my colleagues from the rival The News, Abbas Nasir – who decades later became the editor of Dawn – had taken mental notes of my spirited exchange with the chief minister’s advisor and ran with the story.

  We became increasingly creative in exposing the shady activities of the Sindh government. The Herald, a slick English language monthly magazine and part of the Dawn group of newspapers – then led by a woman editor, Sherry Rehman – splashed an investigative report on the front cover on how the Criminal Investigation Agency (CIA) had kidnapped PPP loyalists to force them to change their loyalties.

  As the Herald hit the newsstands and the educated elite began to buy the magazine, the Sindh government panicked. They signaled to the intelligence agencies to act. Suddenly, plainclothes police descended on the pavements of Karachi’s main bazaar – Saddar – and began to remove the magazines. They also threatened hawkers, who furtively sold the magazine – with its daring, glossy front cover – to curious motorists.

  I took even bigger risks whilst reporting. In those days, I visited the white, fortress-style Karachi Central Jail, which held Sindhi nationalist prisoners with secrets. In September 1991, some of these political prisoners, who were readers of Dawn, acknowledged me as a potential newspaper ally in fighting the Jam government.

  On one such visit, the prisoners told me that Jam’s advisor on home affairs, Irfanullah Marwat had offered to reduce their jail sentences if they agreed
to become approvers in criminal cases against Benazir’s husband, Asif Zardari. Zardari was already being prosecuted in the Special Court for Suppression of Terrorist Activities, set up under Nawaz Sharif. However, these sorts of political cases were routinely dismissed due to lack of evidence and the army-backed Sharif government sought new and more creative ways to convict him.

  Once I had the story, with the names of the prisoners who had offered the information, the desire to expose the officials got into my blood. I convinced my city editor, Akhtar Payami to run with the story.

  In September 1991, Dawn ran my investigative report with a single column headline on the back page: “Prisoners offered remissions to become approvers against Zardari.”

  As my mother read the by-line on the news report, she murmured with her usual maternal concern, “I hope they don’t hurt you.”

  By then, I was already too deeply involved in investigating the Sindh government to worry about the consequences. In those heady days – stopping for lunch at the Karachi Press Club – I heard stories from my journalist colleagues about reporters and photographers from interior Sindh who had been threatened, roughed and their newspaper offices ransacked for reporting the Sharif government’s excesses against the PPP. It only raised my adrenalin and made me determined to fight back.

  Only days after Dawn published my report on the prisoners, knife-wielding thugs were sent to jolt me into realizing my mortality and the price of keeping the press free.

  The Press Fights Back

  1991 will go down as the year that the Pakistani press united to stop further attacks on journalists. Several had been attacked before us, but the assaults on me and Kamran started a fire.

  There was a reason for it. Kamran worked for the Jang group of newspapers, while I was reporter for the Dawn group of newspapers – the two biggest publishing houses, which combined owned about half the effective print publications in the country at the time. Their tycoon owner-publishers, the Mir Shakilur Rehman and Haroon families were represented in the highest newspaper bodies – All Pakistan Newspaper Society (APNS) and the Council of Newspaper Editors and Publishers (CPNE) – which wield a huge influence on Pakistan’s governments.

  The week after I was threatened with knives, the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists (PFUJ) and the All Pakistan Newspaper Employees Confederation (APNEC) energized journalist protests in rallies and demonstrations held across Pakistan. PFUJ and APNEC serve as the backbone of the journalist industry and their activism under the harsh dictatorship of Gen. Zia ul Haq yielded dividends in keeping the media free.

  The military-backed Nawaz Sharif’s government refused to accept responsibility for the attacks on journalists. Between April 26 and October 24, 1991, the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) sent four letters to Sharif, protesting against the mounting attacks on the press. They were met with stony silence.

  It was left to my journalist colleagues to fight for press freedom. In the aftermath of the attacks on me and Kamran, journalists walked out of the assembly in the four provinces of Pakistan – Sindh, Punjab, Balochistan and Northwest Frontier Province – and forced the assemblies to condemn the attacks on the press. Each day, the newspapers appeared chock-full of statements by politicians, human rights groups, labor leaders, women and civil society to condemn the Sindh government and demand the arrest of our attackers.

  From my sanctuary in Islamabad, my mother told me the phone at our Karachi home rang off the hook. Government officials, politicians, journalists and, of course, friends called to ask about my welfare. Embarrassed by the negative publicity they received, officials in Jam Sadiq Ali’s cabinet offered to appoint police officials to a security post they proposed to build across from my house. It was like asking the fox to guard the chicken coop. I rejected their offer.

  Knives Were Used to Send a Message

  As I lay low in Islamabad, Benazir Bhutto issued a statement from overseas which squarely blamed the federal and Sindh government for the attacks on me and Kamran that read:

  “Both journalists have a distinguished record of investigative journalism, which includes an expose of the MQM and the criminal activities being conducted at the CIA headquarters. There is no doubt that these attacks have been coordinated by the Jam Government on the instructions of Nawaz Sharif and Ghulam Ishaq Khan.”

  It was a fair indictment of the perpetrators, except that it cast doubt on the MQM’s role in the attacks. Although the ethnic party used to dictate news coverage, threaten hawkers and burn newspapers considered to be unfriendly, by the fall of 1991 they were themselves victims of the army’s “Operation Clean-up.” As such, they were not in a position to conduct the attacks.

  The MQM chief, Altaf Hussein – who had fled to London earlier that year after the army tried to divide his party – attempted to clarify the perception that his party was involved. In his press statement of September 27, 1991, Altaf said:

  “We too differ with some of the media contents, but we go to the people and ask them to stop reading a particular paper. The MQM has never attacked any newspaper office or resorted to such things.”

  I took the MQM statement with a handful of salt. At that moment, however, I recognized that I had grown entangled in the war between the intelligence agencies.

  Back then, the MI – which is the political wing of the military and which also provided me and Kamran with information – was apparently at odds with the techniques used by the ISI and the IB in arm-twisting the PPP’s political opponents. The IB’s chief, Brig Imtiaz Ahmed – whose agency snooped around to guess which journalists could expose their tactics – had put us on its “hit list,” with a directive to the local Crime Investigation Agency to ensure that we did not interfere in their mafia operations.

  An Historic Protest

  Five days had passed and I watched the national outcry against the knife attacks from my brother, Pervez’s place in Islamabad. That weekend, Pervez’s colleague at the Quaid-i-Azam University, Dr A. H. Nayyar arrived, carrying heavy editions of the newspapers. Dr Nayyar – a nuclear physicist, like my brother – was hugely invested in the political situation inside Pakistan and had a wry sense of humor.

  Apparently tired from the weight of the weekend editions of the English and Urdu newspapers he had been carrying, Nayyar plunked them on the table in front of us and flopped down himself.

  “What’s the news?” my brother Pervez asked.

  “Nothing,” Nayyar replied wearily. “They’re full of statements on Nafisa.”

  I went through the newspapers. Statements were splashed across every newspaper by political parties, journalist unions, women’s organizations, minority groups and human rights groups. In several instances, they named the influential culprits and demanded punishment for the attacks on me and my colleague.

  Even while the federal government assured our employers and the journalist unions that our attackers would be caught and punished, we knew that nothing of the sort would happen. The matter of free press was inextricably linked with the polarized politics in Sindh and could not be resolved short of dismissing the Sindh government. The newspaper bodies correctly surmised that the media would suffer unless we demonstrated a collective show of strength.

  And so newspapers, magazines and periodicals announced they planned to suspend publication on September 29, 1991. It was an unprecedented event, designed to halt 25 million copies for one day in order to protest against the attacks on journalists. The journalist community declared that, as a mark of protest, no reporter would attend or cover the government functions on that day – a Sunday.

  On the day of the press shutdown, my journalist colleagues from The News took me to the home of their editor, Maleeha Lodhi. Lodhi would later serve as Pakistan’s ambassador to the US under Benazir Bhutto and then Pervaiz Musharraf. Maleeha looked at me searchingly and said, “You know, Kamran is associated with the intelligence agencies. But with you we know there is no such association.”

  A journalist friend of mi
ne, Ayoub Shaikh had once asked me, eyes twinkling, “I sometimes wonder, who does Nafisa work for?”

  “No one,” I had said, “I work for myself.”

  “I know,” he had said, smiling.

  On the day of the strike, the Rawalpindi Union of Journalists organized a national event in Rawalpindi – Islamabad’s twin city – which was addressed by media stalwarts such as the president of the All Pakistan Newspaper Society, Farhad Zaidi, veteran journalist turned politician, Mushahid Hussain, The News editor, Maleeha Lodhi, senior editors and representatives of journalist unions.

  I spoke in a highly charged manner, fired up by my close encounter. Mostly, I told journalists in Islamabad about the incredibly polarized political situation in my southern home province of Sindh. “If we do not stand together, I am afraid that a journalist may be killed any day now,” I said. It was a speech made from the heart and it appeared in the press on October 1, when the newspapers went back into circulation.

  Figure 6 Karachi journalists protest attack against press on September 30, 1991 (Dawn photo).

  A Pakistan Television team was on hand to film the rally at Rawalpindi Press Club. I was surprised to see them, wondering how the government had allowed them to film the protest. Later, watching the video footage of the nationwide protests in the districts, towns and cities – and an impressive march in Karachi from whence the attacks had emanated – it was evident that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was not entirely in charge.

  What Price for a Free Press?

  I came back to Karachi, energized by the uproar in the newspapers. The ripple effects continued as column writers marveled at how the entire journalistic community had put aside its differences and united for a common cause. The newspaper industry had successfully communicated its message to the government. The attacks on journalists ended, giving me renewed courage to return to reporting.