Aboard the Democracy Train (13 page)

To borrow a phrase from English novelist Charles Dickens, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Although Benazir had not even begun any land reforms, the prospect of her unleashing the power of the people had led the establishment to intimidate independent journalists.

The chief minister of Sindh, Jam Sadiq Ali began to exert his influence over the press, offering incentives to journalists
for being sympathetic to the administration whilst punishing those who did not comply with the government’s policy of vilifying Benazir Bhutto, her husband, Asif Zardari, and other PPP loyalists. He began with the carrot approach.

Even as a provincial minister under Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the 1970s, Jam was reputed to be generous with state funds. It was rumored that, at one time – when Bhutto and Jam drove around the mausoleum of Pakistan’s founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah – the prime minister had leaned over and whispered, “Jam – at least don’t sell off land around the mausoleum.”

So, when journalists received an invitation from the chief minister to have lunch with him at the CM House, we joked half-seriously that the administration might try to buy our loyalties with plots of government land.

I had never seen Jam at close range. As he walked by unsteadily, I felt an odd repulsion. Perhaps it was the way he eyed the women dressed in flowery
shalwar kameez
, dyed with bright splashes of summer color. As his gaze rested on me, I saw him flinch. He saw my skeptical expression as he sized me up.

The chief minister’s aides stood by dutifully as Jam handed me a beautifully wrapped package. I took the gift in the spirit of Sindhi hospitality. Of course, they were not the papers for a government plot of land we had joked about. Instead, afterwards we found we’d received expensive fabric woven with brilliant rainbow threads – likely to be used as a sofa cover or bedspread.

There was nothing unusual about Jam Sadiq Ali offering the carrot to journalists. This is how political parties and organized groups in Pakistan interact with the media. Those who host lunches or give presents obviously mean to tilt the news in their favor. Indeed, in the open and hospitable Pakistani culture, there is a fine line between being gracious and offering bribes. Mentally, I made the distinction. Although I accepted these gifts, they never stopped me from being critical.

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.

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.

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.