I WAS to go back to Lahore a few weeks later in circumstances not so much as dramatic as cloak and dagger. I received a telephone call from Col Majeed Malik, the Principal Information Officer, informing me that a letter was on its way to me. The contents of the letter were top secret and were not to be disclosed to anybody, and I was to telephone him when I got the letter, confirming its receipt and, by innuendo, compliance.
I had absolutely no idea what it was all about. Col Majeed Malik was not forthcoming. He had turned into a Silent Buddha or a Trappist Monk. I did some speculation of my own. The worst-case scenario was that I was to be shot at dawn, and I saw myself, up and being asked for my last wish, blindfolded and then shot. What would my last request be? A cigarette? Or that I wanted to hear Beethoven’s Violin Concerto for the last time? I shook off these black thoughts, and concentrated on the best-case scenario. I was joining Ayub’s cabinet!
The letter arrived through a dispatch rider. It was marked Top Secret, and the envelope was not merely sealed, but it appeared to be bandaged. It said that I was to leave for Lahore the following morning, an air ticket was enclosed and I would be met at the airport. The most infuriating part of it was that I had to keep all this to myself and I thought of lines from a song: I talked to the trees, but they don’t listen to me.
Intrigued, mystified and fearful, I flew to Lahore in a PIA Viscount, and a car was waiting for me at the tarmac. The driver saluted me smartly and, though dressed in civvies, clearly was an army jawan. I was whisked away and taken to the residence of the Martial Law Administrator Sector ‘B’. There waiting for me were Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Khalid Shaikh, Brigadier F.R. Khan and Col Majeed Malik. Qudratullah Shahab would make an appearance later.
“Have you heard the news?” I was asked by Majeed Malik. “What news?” I asked. “We have taken over the PPL group of newspapers,” I was told. “Oh no!” was my spontaneous reaction. This was not the response they were expecting, and Zulfi Bhutto said that he wanted to speak to me alone and we went to another room.
HE read me the riot act and said that it was a chance of a lifetime for me. I told him in no uncertain terms that I disapproved of the action and whoever had advised Ayub Khan, was no friend of his. “This is fascism,” I said. Zulfi told me to keep my views to myself and not to mount a soap-box, and reminded me that we were living under martial law and I should put my principles on hold.
But he was my well-wisher, and advised me that if I was not interested (in becoming Editor of Pakistan Times) I should come up with some other excuse. We went back to the other room. “What do you say?” I was asked. I told them that there were some personal reasons why I could not leave Karachi. Brigadier F.R. Khan was now doing the talking. He told me to think it over and he would arrange a room for me at the Faletti’s hotel and they would get in touch with me. “Please don’t leave the hotel,” he said. Somewhat flippantly I asked whether I was under house arrest? “Just stay put at the hotel,” he told me, unsmilingly.
When I got to the hotel, I found that ‘Bapu’ Murad was also staying there. At least I would have some company. The news of the takeover of the PPL group of newspapers had spread like wild fire. My brother Abo telephoned me from Karachi. He had put two and two together. “Don’t do it,” he said, exercising an elder brother’s concern to protect the younger. Convinced that another Big Brother may be listening, I told him that all was well and the family should not worry.
I heard nothing for two days and I just lounged around the hotel and then I got a call from Brigadier F.R. Khan and was asked to report back, and a car was being sent to me. Let me say here that I was treated with utmost respect. The brigadier asked me what I had decided, and I told him that I wanted to stay in Karachi. He asked me, who in my opinion, should be the editor. I said that it should be Mazhar Ali Khan. He said that was going back to square-one and it was out of the question. “Who else?” he asked. “I don’t suppose Faiz Sahib would be acceptable either,” I said, almost teasingly. The brigadier saw no future in talking with me and told me that I could go back to Karachi and to my unemployment.
THE PPL group of newspapers was owned by Mian Iftikharuddin, who was better known as a politician with leftist leanings, which in the tortured minds of petty people who controlled the levers of power, meant the same thing as being a communist. Mian Sahib, who was a regular at our Friday nights at Air Cottage, was far from that.
Around the extreme reactionaries who proliferated the political scene, he seemed a radical. But I could not imagine him crashing the barricades to establish a Dictatorship of the Proletariat. The Pakistan Times had been the flagship of the PPL group of newspapers. Faiz Ahmed Faiz had been its editor, and this strengthened the perception of its ‘progressive’ proclivities.
FOR some estrange reason, the word ‘progressive’ had been commandeered by leftist groups and communist-front organisations as had the words ‘revolutionary’ and ‘radical’. The Pakistan Times had an independent editorial policy and since it did not toe the line and neither did its Urdu-language sister publication Imroze, through the logic of our homegrown McCarthyism, it was confidently believed that these newspapers drew their inspiration from Moscow.
A senior bureaucrat, one of the pillars of the Establishment, was convinced that the editorials of the Pakistan Times were being written in Moscow. He told me this in the presence of Abrar Siddiqui, who was the Karachi-editor of Imroze, and Abrar, otherwise a model of a good-mannered, law-abiding and upright citizen, had laughed in the face of the bureaucrat.
Faiz Sahib had been replaced by Mazhar Ali Khan as editor of Pakistan Times, and he was a worthy successor. He was independent, had the courage of his convictions and was nobody’s stooge. I did not know him well though I respected him, and he had once, somewhat gingerly, asked me to cover cricket for the Pakistan Times, and I had had to decline because of my Times of Karachi commitment.
Zamir Niazi, in his book Press in Chains — meticulously researched and a devastating indictment of successive governments, each guilty of muzzling the press, some in an open, high-handed manner, others more subtly — provides valuable information on the takeover of the PPL group of newspapers. It is from this book that we learn that newspapers all over the country came out with this identical news item on its front pages the following day:
“The Pakistan Government took this action under Section 11 of the Pakistan Security Act which was amended by an Ordinance issued by the President on Thursday (April 16). The amending ordinance enlarges the scope of Section 11 of the Security Act as to empower the Government to change the management of newspapers instead of banning them outright — which, in the opinion of the Government, published or contained matters likely to endanger the defence, external affairs or security of Pakistan.”
It was an extraordinary charge, this charge of subversion. People commit subversion, not institutions, and how a newspaper could endanger the defence, external affairs and security of a country, would, in other circumstances, have been dismissed as rantings of a mind touched by too much sun, had the government not been in dead earnest and did not genuinely believe that what they did was an act of unadulterated patriotism.
I had had only a walk-on role, but the lucky star that has guided my destiny had never shone more brightly. I was unemployed and I had no idea of what my next job would be. People do not become journalists because they want to be rich. For all the hard work he puts in and the long hours he keeps, a journalist finds it hard to make two ends meet.
I didn’t fear that I would not have a roof over my head or go without regular meals. I was living with my brother Sattoo at Air Cottage. By refusing the offer of the government, I did not know whether I had blotted my copy book. But I returned to Karachi, pretty pleased with myself and not without some pride.
IN my own estimation, I had been weighed in the balance and not found wanting, and I was not prepared to go beyond defending the bad against the worse. Already, so soon after it had been imposed, the bloom had gone from martial law! Was it a vision, or a waking dream?/Fled is that music, do I wake or sleep? It was a good time to remember Keats.
I WAS to go back to Lahore a few weeks later in circumstances not so much as dramatic as cloak and dagger. I received a telephone call from Col Majeed Malik, the Principal Information Officer, informing me that a letter was on its way to me. The contents of the letter were top secret and were not to be disclosed to anybody, and I was to telephone him when I got the letter, confirming its receipt and, by innuendo, compliance.
