The News of a Kidnapping

The house of Najam Sethi and Jugnu Mohsin, the couple who run The
Friday Times, an independent newsweekly published out of Lahore, was
broken into last Friday by men, twenty of them wearing the Punjab
police uniform. They claimed they were ISI, according to Jugnu Mohsin
(an ISI spokesman denied any involvement the next working day). They
beat up the private security guards of the house, locked Jugnu Mohsin
in the bathroom and took away Najam Sethi without pressing charges.

Some of the events, chronological, that took place after the
kidnapping:

- Asma Jehangir, the famous human rights lawyer, approached the Lahore
High Court on behalf of Jugnu Mohsin and was reported by The News to
have called the event a kidnapping by the state.

- The Lahore High Court moved the government to explain itself (but
did not order the government to produce the detainee).

- The Advocate General Punjab pleaded ignorance of the whereabouts of
Najam Sethi before the court.

- Government spokesmen stated that the arrest had been made "in
connection" with the report the Pakistani High Commissioner had given
on Sethi's speech in Delhi. No mention of the charge.

- Days into the disappearance of Najam Sethi there are reports in the
newspapers that he has been picked up for sedition under the Pakistan
Penal Code and the Army Act. There is still no charge sheet.

What Najam Sethi said in Delhi before an India International Centre
crowd had very little to do with his being picked up. His address
describes Pakistan's ideological, economic, legal crises no better or
worse than daily debates in Pakistani English Language editorial
pages. Much of what he has said he has said before in his editorials,
and in particular, at an address before The National Defence College
earlier in the year.

Asked if there was any, any other way of looking at this news of the
kidnapping of Najam Sethi, Aamer Ahmed Khan, the Editor of The Herald
(a monthly out of Karachi) replied: "No. It's intimidation. They are
frightening the press by making an example of Najam Sethi."

The Friday Times has been stubbornly focused on the financial
shenanigans of the ruling Sharifs: unrepaid loans the principle
embarrassment. Najam Sethi has also given an interview to the BBC team
preparing a documentary on the Sharifs. Two other journalists who have
spoken to the BBC were harassed: Imtiaz Alam of The News had his car
set on fire, and Hussain Haqqani, also of The Friday Times, has been
arrested. The majistrate's report said that Haqqani had the marks of a
beating.

Lahore is one of those cities of the sub-continent that counts as a
habit-forming city. Insular and idiosyncratic are Lahori ways. Of the
people I spoke to and whose responses I have read, none has identified
with the insecurity of the journalist and the sanctity of the citizen
Najam Sethi's residence.

Najam Sethi and Jugnu Mohsin live in the upper-class enclave that is
Gulberg and the fact that their private security guards were brushed
aside did not strike a chord with Lahoris. A lot of people did say
this: it is fine for Najam Sethi to speak his mind in Lahore, but not
Delhi.

This sentiment may have to do with people perceiving Sethi as a
political animal (he was a minister in the last caretaker government)
and not as a dissident. But it has more to do with the peculiar notion
of territorialism that persists despite our living in the digital age.

Nobody was impressed with the argument that Najam Sethi's address at
the India International Centre was a double-edged rebuke. It chided
the Indian establishment for its less-than-great-power habit of
picking fights with Pakistan, its Kashmiri repression and for its
insane initiatives in the arms race, an arms race that will create a
bhooka nanga Pakistan, an obviously terrible threat to its
neighbour. Sethi makes threadbare the hypocrisy of the Indian offer
for a no-first-strike and the rejection of the no-war-pact offer of
Pakistan. Nor was anyone impressed, including the prime minister it
seems, with the compliments Najam paid to Nawaz Sharif for his peace
initiatives with India.

But here is the authentic Lahori response to the disappearance of
Najam Sethi. Remember The Friday Times is hugely famous for its
Ittefaqnama on the back page. This is the imagined diary of NS in
which one can listen in on, say, NS talking to President Clint
Eastwood speaking to N'waz from his Oral Office and N'waz in cabinet
meetings with Msaibsaab (Minister Mushahid Hussain). So a son of
Lahore says: when Jugnu and Najam are privy to Cabinet meetings, when
they know what President Tarrar dreamt the previous night, how come
they do not know that Najam was going to be arrested and which
government agency was going to do the arresting?