ISLAMABAD, Oct 6: Veteran journalist and pioneer of trade unionism in the newspaper industry of Pakistan, Asrar Ahmad, died at the age of 89 in a secluded corner of Rawalpindi on Saturday evening — all alone as he always lived.

Ibadat, the man who had been taking care of him for 17 years, broke the news to the press community which had all but forgotten the man who laid the foundation of Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists (PFUJ). He retired from active journalism as Pakistan bureau chief of the now defunct American wire service UPI — United Press International.

He will be buried on Sunday at 10am in a graveyard close to the house in Street 4, Westridge Valley, near Katcha Stop opposite the Railway Carriage Factory, where he had been living for the past few years.

His last wish, expressed to two friends who visited him only two days before his death, was that some newspaper reviewed his book ‘Walls Have Ears’ — the story of his life and struggles, that began the day he joined Dawn, the newspaper founded by Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah before the creation of Pakistan in Delhi.

“I thought I had entered a noble profession but with the passage of time, I was all the more convinced that it was the other way round. What is known as objectivity in journalism is now confined only to a few quotes. The rest is one’s own figment of imagination or fixation,” he says in the preface of the book that came out in 2011.

Unfortunately it did not receive any attention beyond a close circle of friends because of its poor proofreading and mismatch of some events and the people involved in them. But the latter shortcoming can be excused because Asrar Sahib wrote the book from a failing memory.

“I wouldn’t have ventured into the profession if I knew I would have to look upon everything with doubt and suspicion. Invariably, a journalist sees a satan in an angel and vice versa just in quest of a fresh angle to find a market for the story. The worst is when a journalist starts living his own concoctions and keeps on chasing them with follow-ups,” he laments in his book.

Asrar Sahib to all, and ‘Haji PurAsrar’ to his closest friends because of his secretive nature — most of whom left for the other world before him — he lived in style and entertained friends lavishly, but alas died in distress.

Mr Asrar Ahmad was an upright man who lived an austere life, spending long years encamped in a room inside a Rawalpindi hostel that served both as home and office. He did not marry.

He was born on Oct 23, 1923 in Gorakhpur in eastern Uttar Pradesh in a family of educationists. After finishing school in his hometown, about which he writes fondly in his book, he went to Aligarh University for higher education and then straight to Dawn in Delhi to start his long career in journalism. His achievements in journalism apart, he made his mark in fighting for the rights of working journalists — not just at home but abroad too as a leader of the Afro-Asian Journalists Association.

Mr Ahmad started his career in journalism as a sub-editor with Dawn in 1946. After partition he came to Karachi and joined the Sindh Observer as a reporter. From there he moved on to The Pakistan Times before going on to work as the bureau chief of the UPI in Pakistan for more than 35 years.

He recounted his long years as a journalist in his book —picking up the story from the momentous issues surrounding partition and covering the phases that Pakistan subsequently went through.

Respected for his skills as a journalist, it was the trade union that provided Asrar Ahmad with a platform to display his qualities as a leader with distinction. He was the moving spirit behind a famous 42-day strike by workers of the Sindh Observer, promising to wage many more struggles for the rights of journalists in the future. Afterwards, he emerged as one of the most committed pioneering leaders of the PFUJ, helping set a glorious tradition for times to come.

Mr Ahmad was the founder secretary-general of the PFUJ and went on to serve as its president, handing over the mantle to K.G. Mustafa in the late 1960s. His fight for journalists all through the Ayub Khan period — a crucial phase in the history of Pakistan and the history of journalism in the country — was exemplary and he played an important role in setting the wage board for newspaper workers.