Remembering ABS Jafri: Part - I

It was 1989. I was 25 years old and had just come back from Moscow – yes, the Soviet Union was still around. I started writing for the Urdu daily ‘Jang’ and used to frequent its office on a weekly basis. Nearby there was the Dawn office where my friend Muhammad Jami worked as sub-editor.

It became a regular practice for me to visit my friend at Dawn who worked under the supervision of A R Khaliq – a senior journalist who encouraged young writers like us to read and write better English. It was Khaliq sahib who first introduced me to a newly launched newspaper ‘The Tribune’ under the editorship of ABS Jafri. And what a newspaper it was!

Perhaps the first four-colour newspaper in Pakistan, it contained high-quality news reports with pictures and its headlines were a joy to read. But a couple of significant pages that Khaliq sahib urged us to read were its editorial and op-ed pages.

Perhaps the most eye-catching was a coloured picture of the then prime minister Benazir Bhutto on the front page with a caption ‘Shall we tell the prime minister?’ – and below the picture there was always something for the attention of the PM. That was my first introduction to ABS (Akhtar bin Shahid) Jafri and his impeccable writings in English. His editorials were always a treat with their incisive comments on current affairs. Unfortunately, the newspaper that Mahmud Sipra financed could not survive due to bad management, closing down within a few months, leaving dozens of employees jobless with unpaid arrears.

Then in the 1990s, I came across two old books by ABS Jafri; bought them off the footpath at the Regal Sunday book bazaar in Sadr Karachi. Thanks to my habit of collecting books by senior journalists, the two books I bought at throwaway prices were a good addition to my collection – still adorning my bookshelves. ‘Here lies India’ (published in 1966) contains columns that ABS Jafri penned during and after the India-Pakistan War in 1965. ‘Behind the Killing Fields of Karachi’ is about Karachi witnessing unprecedented violence in the 1990s.

ABS Jafri was an unhappy observer of the increasing brutalisation of the city that was home to millions of people from across Pakistan. My visits to old bookshops enhanced my ABS Jafri collection with ‘Snapshots of Shame: 1996’, ‘Jinnah Betrayed’, and ‘Diary of a Wicked War’ – all published by Royal Book Company in 1997, 1999, and 2003 respectively.

More about his books later, now something about his person and profession is in order. Born in 1927 in Badaun, India, he died in November 2003 at the age of 76. I had nearly forgotten him, then nearly a decade later his niece, Urooj Jafri – a fine journalist in her own right – handed me her compilation of articles about and tributes to ABS Jafri. ‘The life and times of ABS Jafri’ that Urooj Jafri compiled and her husband Ilyas Khan edited contains nearly 20 pieces that ABS Jafri friends and admirers wrote after his passing.

Urooj writes about her uncle: “He distinguished himself as the editor of one of Pakistan’s first and once largest English language newspaper, ‘The Pakistan Times’, and later at the Arab world’s oldest English newspaper, ‘Kuwait Times’. He also edited the more prestigious Pakistani newspaper, ‘The Muslim’.

“During his career he offered political and sports commentary to Radio Pakistan and worked as a correspondent for the British Broadcasting Corp (BBC), the British Reuters news agency, and the Arab News Agency (ANA).”

I A Rehman in his tribute ‘A life exquisitely lived’ recalls: “My earliest recollection of Jafri Sahib, as I always addressed him, is of the days in [the] early 1950s when he ran a British news agency, ‘Star’, from a small office-cum residence apartment in the Dayal Singh Building, on the Mall in Lahore. His duties did not make any heavy demand on his time and, a fast disposer of matters that he was, he could satisfy the demands of the distant employer in a short time. The rest of the time he used to survey whatever was attractive in Lahore and indulge in his passion for making friends, the only condition being the other party’s capacity to sustain an intelligent conversation.”

ABS Jafri married a Bengali widow, Ruquyya Begum (also spelt as Roquyya), with two children. In ‘My partner through thick and thin’ Ruquyya writes: “In the 1962 elections, I was elected a member of the National Assembly, which was the main legislative body in those days since there was no senate at that time. Our party was in the opposition, and I was named its parliamentary secretary. It was as member of the National Assembly and secretary of the opposition that I first encountered ABS, who at that time was working as assistant editor of the English daily ‘The Pakistan Times’.”

One of the best tributes is from Salim Asmi, our editor at Dawn in the early 2000s. Asmi draws an amazing picture of Jafri who was a close friend and a colleague for years at different newspapers. In his article ‘The Harbinger of Seasons’, Asmi recalls his early acquaintance with Jafri at the Pakistan Times (PT): “I bounced back to PT like a bad coin. All this while I had to content myself with having just a nodding acquaintance with Mr Jafri. But then finally began the most gratifying and purposeful phase of my professional and spiritual life.

“The newsroom of a morning paper is a virtual graveyard of one’s creative capabilities. The drudgery of making other people’s banal copy intelligible casts a dark shadow and stifles creativity. Writing even a single sentence becomes a daunting endeavour. But with Jafri Sahib around, this pathetic barrenness could not last long. His charming and persuasive demeanour was a compelling inspiration and soon quite a few of us mentally-blocked sub-editors began to try our hand at writing. It was unthinkably difficult at first as nearly all human activity is, but gradually our confidence in ourselves grew and things started to look brighter.

“Mr Jafri would assign subjects for investigative reporting and we would take the job in earnest. We would be beside ourselves with gratitude if Mr Jafri showed slightest sign of approval. That’s how it was in those days. And so slowly, almost imperceptibly, I got closer to Jafri Sahib – a bond that would grow stronger with time… Grey-haired and with neatly groomed beard, he was a soft-spoken man and could talk on a variety of subjects in a measured, sophisticated tone with enviable lucidity.”

When General Zia overthrew Z A Bhutto as prime minister and dissolved the assemblies in July 1977, he was conjuring up a new cabinet. The dictator called ABS Jafri to offer him the ministry of information as federal minister. Jafri refused and had to leave the Pakistan Times. After years of economic hardships he found a job at Kuwait Times. Jafri’s friend S M Shahid in his article ‘The battles he fought’ writes:

“After the overthrow of the elected government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto by General Ziaul Haq in 1977, ABS was contacted by the military government to take over the Ministery of Information. He turned down the offer with contempt. As a consequence of this ‘indiscretion’ he was summarily removed from the editorship of Pakistan Times. Not only that, he was blacklisted for employment by any newspaper in the country. He remained unemployed for four years. Finally, persuaded by friends to leave the country, he went to Kuwait and joined the Kuwait Times as its editor.”

Naeem Mirza in his piece titled ‘The second cycle of life’ narrates: “The second cycle of his career… begins around early 1980s, when he arrived in ‘Kuwait Times’. After spending almost a decade at ‘Kuwait Times’ and bringing respect to it among a wide range of English-speaking communities, he returned to Pakistan… The project was to launch ‘The Tribune’, a four-colour, state-of-the-art daily newspaper from Karachi. It was a period when military dictator Ziaul Haq, the man ABS despised more than anything else in the world, had perished in a mid-air disaster and Pakistanis were anxiously waiting for democracy to return. This expected dawn of democracy might have been one reason why ABS wanted to return…”

To be continued

The writer holds a PhD from the University of Birmingham, UK. He tweets/posts @NaazirMahmood and can be reached at:

mnazir1964@yahoo.co.uk