The demolition man disappears

In the early hours of May 8 8212; it8217;s under the cover of darkness that the blackest deeds are normally done 8212; the Pakistani police in Lahore picked up Najam Sethi, the editor of Friday Times. They didn8217;t have a warrant, but that didn8217;t deter them from breaking into his Gulberg colony house, beating him up with lathis and handcuffs and dragging him away without his spectacles or his shoes. When Sethi8217;s wife, Jugnu Mohsin, tried to protest, she was peremptorily told that if she didn8217;t keep quiet, her husband would be shot. She was then roughed up and locked in a dressing room. Despite a habeas corpus petition on this brutal action, there has been no newsof Sethi since.

The trauma of the event did not prevent Mohsin from wielding her pen as a scalpel. She returned to the office the next day and wrote the Ittefaqnama8217;, her regular column on the last page of the newspaper she publishes, Friday Times, which is said to command the highest readership in Pakistan. Part satire, part Punjabi-English, the feature is usually a demolition job. As the above extract shows, Mohsin put her column to full use to inform readers about the real reason behind Sethi8217;s arrest.For the uninitiated, 8220;BB8221; stands for Benazir Bhutto and the 8220;BBC8221;, the British Broadcasting Corporation. Independent journalists from Pakistan, attempting to explain why Sethi and other newspapermen are being singled out for abuse these days, say the latest crackdown came in the wake of a BBC television team doing a series of reports on the widespread corruption in Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif8217;s government.

These journalists point to a May 3 report by the official news agency, the Associated Press ofPakistan, linking Benazir with the BBC stories. 8220;Her wild accusations against the economic and foreign policy agenda of Nawaz Sharif have provided another excuse to the British media to pile up all kinds of abuses against Pakistan and its leadership. To make Benazir8217;s prediction about the downfall of Sharif come true, BBC has joined the band.8221;

There are others, most notably Pakistan High Commissioner to India Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, who believe that people like Sethi who like to speak their mind cannot be left unchallenged. Reporting to his bosses about Sethi8217;s criticism of Pakistan at a New Delhi lecture a fortnight ago, where Sethi delineated the various crises of identity plaguing the nation-state, Qazi wrote: 8220;My own view is that Najam Sethi8217;s attempts to pose as a heroic liberal fighting against corruption and tyranny by portraying his country as an irrational, contradictory, corrupt, unstable and dangerous entity and that too in India of all places! is an act of contempt against Pakistanamounting to the most contemptible treachery.8221;

Qazi himself, widely seen here as a highly sophisticated diplomat, has so far refused to explain himself; why, for example, do Sethi8217;s views amount to treachery? At one level, the incident has served to destroy the illusion that emanated from the Vajpayee bus ride that Indo-Pakistani relations could at last begin to return to normal. It reminds people on both sides of the border that even with a landslide majority in Parliament like the one Sharif has, 8220;democrats8221; have uncomfortably thin skins.

Having been bound and trussed up for most of its 50-odd years, the Pakistan press is, however, refusing to take things lying down. Back in February, Khaled Ahmed, a noted journalist also with Friday Times, in an article called The Indeterminate Cultural Identity of Mian Nawaz Sharif8217;, had this to say: 8220;Often when his Nawaz Sharif8217;s political initiatives cannot be understood through rational analysis, the explanation can be sought in his psychology. The threeaspects of his decision-making process are: a deeply embedded insecurity vis-a-vis the English-speaking intellectual; a loyalist8217; consensus in his inner sanctum devoted to gratifying his sense of permanent power; and projections about his future offered by occult clairvoyants8230;8221;

It really isn8217;t surprising that Sethi has been targeted by the Government. A vocal critic of Sharif8217;s administration, he savaged the political elite through his journalism and outspoken manner, reserving some of his most trenchant criticism for the Shariat Bill as envisaged by the present polity. 8220;The implications of the Bill are horrendous. If it were passed in its present form, you will have the worst dictator Pakistan has set its eyes upon8230;every word of the PM will be the law of the land8230;and no one will be able to challenge it,8221; he once said.

Perhaps as one who was himself part of his country8217;s elite, Sethi thought he led a charmed life. He became a minister in the interim administration of Muhammed Khan Junejo,where he picked up enough information on both Benazir and Sharif to perhaps become one of the most feared men in Pakistan. That, say some, is another reason for his arrest. Often, in his articles, he called upon a section of the Army to take control of Pakistan, a dangerous idea in itself, and one which certainly didn8217;t go down well with Sharif.Clearly though, his outspoken manner was his main charm. A familiar figure on the Indo-Pakistani seminar circuit, he was often severely critical of New Delhi: either the establishment here was accused of backtracking on bilateral agreements such as on Siachen, or of being mealy-mouthed on throwing open rigid visa rules on travelling across the border. He was said to be 8220;left of centre8221;, but people in New Delhi didn8217;t quite know what to make of him. Mostly, they thought he should be left quite alone.

Meanwhile, Sethi8217;s colleagues are determined to continue fighting the fight. According to Khaled Ahmed, the Government8217;s 8220;next target8221; is the press. 8220;They want tostop the weekly from being published. But we are working so that the next issue comes out on time,8221; he said.

This is exactly what Sethi would have desired. Firing one last shot in favour of the freedom of the press, in front of the Indian gathering a fortnight ago, he said: 8220;I say the same things in Pakistan, in India or in the USA.8221;

8212; JYOTI MALHOTRA