Opinion Winning The Argument

Sethi successfully organised the T20 Pakistan Super League in the UAE and nurtured a new crop of young players — while earning big money for the PCB — who laid India low in England. Many grudge this success but the ousted Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who put him inside the PCB, has won an argument where all other arguments at the Supreme Court have failed to convince.

Sethi is pragmatic and not “drunk with the wine of nationalism” like his predecessor at the PCB, Zaka Ashraf, who took on India’s Big Three monopoly of the game and preened on TV, saying he had heroically isolated Pakistan in cricket. Later, basking in media praise, he criticised Sethi for having kowtowed to India. He must eat his words now that Pakistan has beaten India. But Sethi’s real target is a Pakistan-India series which will be the biggest money-making event in cricket history apart from easing bilateral tensions.

If you are secular in your thinking and criticise Pakistan for military supremacy, you can get into a lot of trouble, maybe get killed through non-state actors. Sethi started publishing books in 1978 and got on the wrong side of the military rule of General/President Zia by publishing From Jinnah to Zia by former Chief Justice of Pakistan, Muhammad Munir. The fact that Sethi had been a rebel in his salad days trying to bring about a revolution in Balochistan — for which he spent time in jail — didn’t go in his favour. He compounded his culpability by setting up The Friday Times (TFT) in 1989, a year after General Zia got killed, a weekly that continues to spread what some regard as secular poison against the ideology of Pakistan.

Nawaz Sharif’s reason for giving him the PCB to run was an act of “secular” conscience separating him from his godfather, General Zia, and driving him to observe Holi with the “kafir” Hindu community. It was recompense for what he had done to Sethi for having gone to India and criticised the way Pakistan was being run. In 1999, The Committee to Protect Journalists wrote to Pakistan: “CPJ is outraged by this weekend’s arrest of veteran journalist Najam Sethi, founder and editor of the English-language weekly newspaper, The Friday Times.” He won the 1999 International Press Freedom Award of CPJ and the 2009 World Association of Newspapers’ Golden Pen of Freedom Award.

TFT never gave up caricaturing Nawaz Sharif’s way of speaking English in a back-page column by Sethi’s wife Jugnu Mohsin, the chief editor of the magazine. Her other column “Im the Dim” mimicking Imran Khan, could have prompted Khan to accuse Sethi — as caretaker chief minister of Punjab — of fixing the 2013 elections in favour of Nawaz Sharif. Sethi thereafter got Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer’s Daily Times newspaper going in Lahore, reviving the tradition of a pluralist past that Pakistan no longer wanted to own. He moans, putting his creed in a nutshell: “The tragedy is that there are not many buyers for my idea of being a Pakistani in which there is no room for the politics of religion or singular religious identity.”

In TFT’s January 22, 2016 issue, he editorialised: “The Establishment’s refusal to talk realistically with India undermines its credentials and ability to negotiate realistically with Washington and Kabul. Much the same attitude underscores the debilitating tension in its relations with popularly elected civilian leaders at home. Significantly, attempts to review external policy and establish internal political neutrality after every change of high command at GHQ have invariably been wrecked at the altar of an unbending institutional view on both fronts.”