Friday times Newspaper Pakistan ,The idea of a truly independent and liberal paper was born one night as I lay fuming under the stars on a hot and sticky August night in Kot Lakhpat Jail in Lahore in 1984.
The idea of a truly independent and liberal paper was born one night as I lay fuming under the stars on a hot and sticky August night in Kot Lakhpat Jail in Lahore in 1984. The country was writhing under martial law. Not a single newspaper editor had dared to write the truth about why General Zia ul Haq had used “preventive detention” laws to jail me. In fact they had all readily clutched at the officially sponsored lies about my case. One day, I silently raged, I would have my own paper and it would stand up to tyranny and expose the lies and fear that stalk our everyday lives.
General Zia ul Haq didn’t like me. I had published “From Jinnah to Zia” by Justice (retd) Mohammad Munir after every major publisher in the country had turned it down because it was overly critical of the dictator. After the author’s death a couple of years later, a khaki emissary advised me to quietly withdraw the book from sale. “You can ban it”, I had demurred. Then I published a book on US-Pak Relations whose cover was taken from a painting by the famous artist Mian Ijaz ul Hasan. It showed the US Aid emblem in which there are two clasped hands in friendship, except that Mian Ijaz had rendered one of the hands as a skeleton and squeezed a drop of blood out of it. The then US Ambassador to Pakistan protested to General Zia and the dye was cast. When Henry Kissinger complained about his book being pirated by a bookseller in Karachi, they went instead for me in Lahore and bunged me in as a “terrorist”. Amnesty International and BBC investigated the case and rubbished the authorities. But not a single Pakistani newspaper was prepared to expose the lie. In the event, no charges were formally pressed and I was released a month later. But by then an idea had begun to germinate whose time would come one day.
In order to start a magazine, an applicant has to have his form cleared and stamped by, in turn, the city magistrate, the local police, the city magistrate
