Aboard the Democracy Train (12 page)

In the post-Benazir era, her widower, Asif Zardari, taking a leaf from history, began with a charm offensive on the MQM’s headquarters – Nine Zero Azizabad – to “seek forgiveness,” for the murders of MQM activists in the PPP era. The MQM chief, Altaf Hussain reciprocated. In a quid pro quo scenario, the PPP government rewarded the MQM with ministerial positions, whilst the latter voted for a PPP prime minister and for Zardari to become president.

All of this has come at a price for the vast majority of Sindhi villagers. In the words of middle-class Sindhis, the PPP submits to the MQM’s urban “blackmail,” by diverting funds from the
rural and Sindhi-populated areas. The PPP Prime Minister, Yusuf Raza Gilani has unsuccessfully attempted to rectify the situation. However, in 2010, he was forced to retract his statement that Hyderabad would be restored as a single administrative unit “to enable just distribution of funds,” after the MQM threatened to break the coalition.

On the other hand, the Pashtun-based Awami National Party, also in coalition with the PPP government, has engaged in violent clashes with the MQM. This has led to spasmodic fighting between Pashtuns and Mohajirs in Karachi, in scenes that eerily resemble the bloody 1980s.

In 2010, the Pashtun-Mohajir conflict claimed so many lives that the MQM chief, Altaf Hussain called for the army’s intervention, only to back down under political criticism. The MQM has frequently threatened to break off its coalition with the PPP government, only to withdraw the threat after getting more concessions.

For the time being, the PPP and MQM have managed to ward off September 30 style conspiracies that threaten violence between the two major ethnic groups of Sindh. Still, it is a fragile coalition that is constantly strained by the separate interests of the Sindhis – who lived in the province before it was Pakistan – and the Mohajirs – who left India to create it.

At the end of the day, it is Sindh’s ethnic divide that keeps its two main ethnic groups – Sindhis and Mohajirs – loyal to their respective political parties and gives the establishment room to manipulate from the center.

September 24, 1991: It was almost 10.00 pm when I turned my car into the dimly lit road that led to our family house in Garden East. Over the years, it had become normal practice for me to alight, turn the key of the small gate and push the large gates open to drive my car inside.

But that evening, driving back alone as usual to my colonial style, fortress-like home, I had an uneasy premonition that I might have become a target because of my investigative reporting.

That year, Sindh Chief Minister Jam Sadiq Ali had cracked the whip on scores of journalists for exposing his underhanded tactics to rein in the PPP opposition. Benazir Bhutto was dismissed after a short, chaotic tenure as prime minister almost a year prior, after which the army had ushered in a new prime minister, Nawaz
Sharif, and accorded him a free hand to ensure that the PPP power base was subdued.

1991, the year that the former Soviet Union collapsed, was also a time when Pakistan’s military – newly strengthened by its Cold War alliance with the US in Afghanistan – turned its attention toward strict domestic surveillance. As the chief of the ISI, Lt. Gen. Asad Durrani was served in Sindh by the Intelligence Bureau (IB), headed by the notorious Brig. Imtiaz Ahmed. The ISI and IB, which are legally authorized to bug telephones, spied on “domestic enemies,” – i.e. PPP members of parliament and independent journalists.

That was also the year that the Chief of Army Staff, Asif Nawaz – who was unusual in the fact that he resisted the army’s interference in political affairs – headed a Military Intelligence (MI), which collected evidence of the manner in which the ISI and the IB hamstrung Benazir Bhutto and her PPP from returning to power.

This is when I inadvertently stepped into the picture.

Almost 24 hours before, Kamran Khan – then a reporter for
The News
and a correspondent for the
Washington Post
– had been stabbed and taken bleeding to hospital. The assailants were young men who attacked him as he stepped outside his office on the busy I. I. Chundrigar Road and were overheard saying in Urdu, “What are you writing? You’re writing too much.”

That afternoon, when a colleague narrated the incident, chills went down my spine. Instantly, I became aware that my reporting on the chief minister’s corrupt tactics could make me the next target of attack.

Within an hour, the Karachi Union of Journalists had mobilized a protest meeting at the Karachi Press Club – a British-built gray stone building in the center of the city. I saw the intense expressions on my colleagues; men and women journalists determined to protest the attack against one of our own. Knowing that our future as independent print journalists was at stake, we hurriedly spilled out into the street with banners and placards in English and Urdu that called for an end to the attacks on journalists.

As we marched, one of my colleagues pointed out that the Deputy Inspector General of the Crime Investigation Agency (CIA), Samiullah Marwat, who took orders from the Sindh Government, drove leisurely in step with our procession. Marwat was known to haul up PPP supporters for brutal interrogation and was suspected to have ordered the stabbing of my injured colleague.

Still, trying to ignore his presence, we kept marching toward the Sindh Chief Minister’s House. Our spirited rally of editors, senior journalists and reporters camped in front of the locked gate with banners and placards, aware of the pressure needed to keep the media free.

In 1991, the English, Urdu and Sindhi print media were in the front lines of independent journalism in Pakistan. Television and radio was state controlled and this was a decade before private electronic media was due to explode onto the scene.

Late evening, driving back home from work, my mind was still preoccupied with our protest. Turning the corner to my house, I slowed down my car in the dark pathway, transfixed by what I saw from my windscreen. There were two shadowy figures that lurked beneath the milky tube-light outside our family home.

As I drew nearer, they advanced toward my car and I saw them more clearly. They were two young men who looked like they had been deputed for the job. In the deserted and faintly lighted street, they stood on either side of my approaching car. I saw a small knife flash as one of the youths made the first move.

Forewarned by the day’s events, I pressed the accelerator and sped past them, driving at break neck speed. Instincts told me to drive toward the nearest police station. Then better sense prevailed and, looking at the rear view mirror to see if the assailants were in hot pursuit, I kept speeding toward my newspaper office.

As I ran up the steps, my colleagues took one look at me and knew. My city editor, Akhtar Payami got that serious preoccupied look he got when any major incident occurred. Instantly, he was on the phone with my editor, even as he assigned two reporters from my newspaper – the late Aleemuddin Pathan and Ali Kabir – to jot down the details.

Aleem, my light-skinned Pashtun colleague – who foreign journalists often mistook for Italian – heard my narration with his usual aplomb. He began typing for the Pakistan Press International wire services in his slow, deliberate style with cigarette in mouth.

Ali Kabir – my senior colleague with a curling moustache and a sardonic air who had tried to give me a hard time for being a free spirit – soberly pounded the story on a manual typewriter.

“It is the first ever attempt on a woman journalist in the history of Pakistan,” he wrote in a news report that appeared the next morning with the headline: “
Dawn
woman reporter escapes attack.”

While my colleagues typed, I waited for my eldest sister, Naseem to take me to her home in Defense Housing Society. It was too dangerous for me to go back home that night. Instead, I told my parents about the incident on the telephone. They listened to me as though they had been half expecting it. My aging parents were no strangers to a daughter who did dangerous, investigative reports and now even they had been dragged into the fray.

A week earlier, my father, then in his seventies, had pulled his car out of the driveway, parked it by the front door and walked back to close the gates when a thug followed him. He pressed a gun to my father’s waist, asked him to be quiet and took away his car keys.

A short while later my mother opened the front door to see a heavy-set man in the driver’s seat. The man stared unblinkingly at her. It did not even cross my mother’s mind that the car in which he silently sat was ours, or that it had been stolen at gunpoint from my father. That was the last time we saw the car, carrying the files of the charity agencies for which my father worked voluntarily.

At my sister’s house, I grappled with the events of the day. Living as I did in the inextricable world of politics and journalism, it became palpably clear to me that I had become one more victim of the political situation that had developed in the province of Sindh.

Coming after Gen. Zia ul Haq’s long military rule, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s short and unceremonious dismissal had caused much anguish to her die-hard supporters. On the other hand, the nation’s feudal, religious and ethnic political parties had
formally bonded in the ISI-funded IJI coalition, with a mandate to prevent the PPP from returning to power.

ISI chief Asad Durrani’s affadavit to the Supreme Court in 1996 revealed that Nawaz Sharif’s appointed chief minister Jam Sadiq Ali had received PKR 5 million (USD 59,000) from the spy agency. As chief minister, Jam would repay the army for every penny they spent on him, wasting no opportunity to vilify Benazir and her husband Asif Zardari – even while the latter was holed up in prison on charges of corruption.

In that highly polarized atmosphere, my independence as a journalist had been cast aside to bracket me with the PPP and I had been dealt with accordingly.

In the grip of a nightmarish night of being chased by knife-wielding thugs, I became bitterly angry at the realization that the government wanted to intimidate us journalists into silence. With the knife threat fresh in my memory, I couldn’t be absolutely certain that they would stop here. Perhaps they would follow through their plan to make sure I was killed.

The sound of the telephone bell ringing early morning made me almost fall out of my bed. I feared the worst. But it was only my brother Pervez, who taught at a university in Islamabad. He had read the report titled “Another Journalist Attacked,” in
The News
– our rival newspaper – and discovered that the journalist was his sister. Furious, he suggested – and my family agreed – that I should fly to Islamabad, situated a thousand miles from Karachi, and lay low until the storm blew over.

The news item about the attack had appeared in all the newspapers across the country, giving me exposure that I had never imagined that I’d experience. The next morning, when my sister booked my ticket from Karachi to Islamabad on Pakistan International Airlines (PIA), the booking clerk told me that he had read about the attack in the newspapers – and that he knew why I was leaving!

That afternoon, on my way to the airport, a ragged hawker thrust an Urdu newspaper –
Qaumi Akhbar
– into the car my sister was driving. On the front page was my face, wearing an intense expression, and a slug in Urdu: “Murder attack on Nafisa.”

Figure 5
Newspaper article of author after attack on September 23, 1991 (Photo by Asghar Bhatti).

Apparently, a creative reporter from the
Qaumi
newspaper had discovered that they had my photograph from the previous day’s rally and called up my parents the night before to get the information for the report.

On the plane to Islamabad, I found myself sitting next to a European woman from a non-governmental organization. She had a copy of
Dawn
newspaper neatly folded her lap with the news item of the attacks on the press prominently displayed on the side. As we struck up a conversation, she told me with concern that she’d read that journalists were being attacked in Pakistan.

I turned the half folded newspaper over, and pointed to the news item entitled “
Dawn
woman reporter escapes attack,” with the words, “That’s me.”

The look of surprise on my newfound acquaintance’s face was unforgettable. Bolting upright in her seat, she drew sideways and looked at me closely. We talked about what it was like to undertake investigative reporting in Pakistan until the plane landed in Islamabad two-and-a-half hours later.

As I recuperated from the shock of the knife attack in Islamabad – Pakistan’s capital city, framed by the Margalla hills – I gained a fresh perspective on the political situation in the country.

With its quiet, well-planned roads and foreign embassies sprawling amidst lush greenery, Islamabad was a far cry from the volatile city of Karachi. It was here that the parliament had tightened the screws on the Sindh administration – a move that had contributed to the attack on my person.