FIDDLING with facts and mutating the truth has always been one of the prerogatives assumed unto themselves by the governments of Pakistan, the first major act of distortion having occurred soon after the death of Founder-Maker, Mohammad Ali Jinnah.

On August 11, 1947, before the flag of Pakistan had been unfurled, Jinnah addressed the future legislators of the nation. He declared : “You are free, free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the State...... We are starting in the days when there is no discrimination, no distinction between one caste or creed and another. We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one state.”

This did not suit the ‘ideology’ and the motives of the men who came to rule after Jinnah’s death, so it was suitably and expediently altered to read: “You may belong to any religion or caste or creed - that has nothing to do with the fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State.” It was their firm intention that religion, caste and creed for all times to come would indeed be the business of the state. And it was the mutilated version of Jinnah’s speech that was given to an unsuspecting Hector Bolitho who shortly after the great man’s death was commissioned by the government to write his official biography (Jinnah — Creator of Pakistan, published in 1954 by John Murray — now out of print.)

The old hackneyed saying about being unable to fool all the people all the time does ring true, for the original unexpurgated speech was resurrected much later, in 1962, when the government of Ayub Khan published ‘Jinnah — Speeches as Governor-General of Pakistan 1947-1948’, and the vital uncensored passage was included in the August 11 speech. A limited number of these books was published and it soon went out of print. To Benazir Bhutto’s credit, in 1989 she had 3,000 copies of the book reprinted.

(A couple of indicative passages, in keeping with Jinnah’s words of August 11, which are not too well known can be found in this book. The first was in a broadcast to the people of Australia in February 1948 : “But make no mistake, Pakistan is not a theocracy or anything like it. Islam demands from us the tolerance of other creeds and we welcome in closest association with us all those who, of whatever creed, are themselves willing and ready to play their part as true and loyal citizens of Pakistan.”

Later that month, speaking to the people of the United States, he said more or less the same thing : “In any case Pakistan is not going to be a theocratic state, to be ruled by priests with a divine mission. We have many non-Muslims — Hindus, Christians and Parsis — but they are all Pakistanis. They will enjoy the same rights and privileges as any other citizens and will play their rightful part in the affairs of Pakistan.”)

Manipulation of the press, the harassment of journalists, and other ‘ways and means’ of control have also never been foreign to our governments (and sad to say, the press itself has far too often been guilty of collusion and self-censorship). Last week, I remembered my old friend, one of our true champions of press freedom, Zamir Niazi, who died in June 2004. His three-book chronicle of the history of the Pakistani press — ‘The Press In Chains’ (1986), ‘The press under Siege’ (1992), and ‘The Web of Censorship’ (1994) remain the only true account of the history of the country’s press up to the early 1990s. He was working on a fourth volume when he died, and thus the many sins committed by the ‘democratic’ governments later in that decade have not yet been fully recorded in book form.

What brought Niazi to mind was a July 25 front-page headline in this newspaper — ‘Reporter of daily Star held — Dawn Group’s statement’. Apparently, “Mr Rashid Channa, senior Pakistani journalist for the Star,” one of Karachi’s evening newspapers, had for many months devoted himself to reporting on the various vagaries of the Sindh government, its chief minister, its ministers and factotums, very little of which could possibly be of a positive nature.

Channa had been picked up from his house at 1330 hours on Sunday July 24 by the usual police posse and driven away into detention from which he was released at 0145 hours on July 25. The operation was undertaken on the orders of a Dr (of what?) Mohammed Ali, the chief minister’s ‘special’ secretary.

According to the statement, the stand-off between the provincial government and the Dawn group had started some six weeks previously when the government “moved to ban all government advertizing in the Dawn Group papers in an attempt to silence critical opinions being expressed...”. That having failed, it resorted to a bit of kidnapping.

A report in the July 25 edition of the Star, under the headline: ‘Duplicity, hypocrisy of enlightened moderation exposed — CM Arbab, govt, declare unholy War on Press’ told us that, “Special secretary to Chief Minister, Mr Mohammad Ali Arain, on the advice of Chief Minister Arbab Ghulam Rahim ordered the arrest of Mr Rasheed Channa, senior journalist and reporter of the Star and of Mr Hameed Haroon, CEO of the Dawn Group of Newspapers. The police official refused to arrest Mr Hameed Haroon saying the instructions were illegal as Mr Haroon was neither a reporter, editor, printer, nor publisher...”.

On July 26, Dawn reported that the police had registered a case against Channa at the Sachal Police Station charging him with the attempted murder of one Maulana Abdul Ghafoor Chishti.

It later transpired that FIR no.233/05 had indeed been registered at 1215 hours on July 24 2005, the day after Channa had been taken off by the police, by Allama Abdul Ghaffar Chishti, s/o Mian Ghulam Fareed, resident of Flat No.706/4 Billy’s Heights, Block 18, Gulistan-i-Jauhar, under Sections 324/34/427/109 of the Pakistan Penal Code and recorded by duty officer Mohammad Rasheed of Sachal Goth PS. The event described by the good Allama had taken place at 4-Mian Road, 200 meters ahead from Kiran Cancer Hospital. A translation from the Urdu of his statement to the police reads :

“I live at the above mentioned address. I am the president of Anjuman Tahfuzul Ulema Ahl-e-Sunat. I registered a case against my in-laws which is under investigation. In this connection, Rasheed Channa, Pervez Iqbal Arain and Kashif contacted me and offered to settle the issue. I told them the conditions on which to settle the issue. They replied they would talk to my in-laws. All of a sudden their attitude changed and they said I should settle the issue unconditionally, otherwise I would face the consequence.

“On July 23, 2005, Rasheed Channa asked me to come over to Kiran hospital at 11 p.m. from where we would go to Haji Bundu Khan restaurant to discuss the issue. I, along with my nephew, Wiki Shahzad, brother Abdul Karim, went to the hospital in my car AC-0975. When we reached Kiran hospital we found Rasheed Channa, Pervez Iqbal Arain and Kashif seated in a white Sunny car V-3777. They signalled us to come ahead. When we moved about 200 meters ahead they stopped their car and I also stopped there and got out of my car. They also got out of their car and with the intention of killing me they took out their pistols and opened fire. I lay down on the ground and a bullet pierced the mudguard of my car on the right side. They escaped in their car. Since I was scared I could not file a case in time and now I have filed this report. My case may be registered against Rasheed Channa, Pervez Iqbal Arain, Kashif/Noor Hussain for attempting to kill me at the behest of my father-in-law Iftikhar Ahmed by opening fire with their pistols. Therefore, action should be taken against them.”

Channa claims that he has never met or seen either the Allama or any of his co-accused. Dr Ali’s relationship to Chief Minister Arbab Rahim is reminiscent of that of Imtiaz Sheikh’s to Chief Minister Jam Sadiq Ali. In actual fact, it is even closer, he is the Arbab’s ‘brother-in-law’. And as we know, every good Muslim believes that ‘Saari khudai ek taraf, jooru ka bhai ek taraf.’ In President General Pervez Musharraf’s regime of enlightened moderation should such token figures be allowed to play a role?

A news item in yesterday’s Metropolitan section of Dawn tells us that on Friday Channa applied for and was granted pre-arrest bail by the Sindh High Court. He will be harassed until the Arbab’s reign is brought to an end.