ABS Jafri — a versatile journalist and man of character
Akhtar bin Shahid Jafri, known to his friends and acquaintances as ABS Jafri, was one of the pioneers of journalism in Pakistan. Those who remember him still will be observing his 10th death anniversary this weekend.
Jafri had a diverse career, spanning more than five decades — an accomplished journalist, a broadcaster, and a writer who authored several books on the history and politics of Pakistan.
He distinguished himself as the editor of one of Pakistan’s first and largest English language newspapers, Pakistan Times, and later of the Arab world’s oldest English newspaper, the Kuwait Times. He also edited the once 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). He was probably the only Pakistani journalist who started his career in India.
Born in 1927 in a family of public servants from Badaun in India, he started out as a reporter for a news agency in New Delhi in June 1947. On the 7th of August, 1947, he landed in Karachi on an assignment to cover the inauguration of a new country, Pakistan.
In an interview, he said, emigration was the least among his thoughts because he left his home with just a couple of shirts to work on a week-long assignment in Karachi. But he was stranded there when riots disrupted communications between India and Pakistan.
Later, most of his family members took trains to Pakistan, precluding his return to India.
Over the next few years, he transmuted from an Indian correspondent in Pakistan to a Pakistani correspondent in India, representing the Associated Press of Pakistan (APP) news agency. The APP, which was still called the Associated Press of India (API) at the time, assigned him to cover India in 1951. So he found himself among his old friends in Delhi again, rubbing shoulders with high-profile foreign correspondents from around the world, and living next doors to the Maharaja of Kashmir at Delhi’s only five-star hotel of the time, the Imperial Hotel.
In 1958, he joined Pakistan Times, a newspaper highlighting progressive strands within the Pakistan Muslim League. He joined as an assistant editor and went on to become its editor. Many of his associates say it was here that he found scope for his versatile gifts. He himself said in an interview in late 70s that the years he spent at Pakistan Times were the best of his life as a journalist. But his career at PT also illustrated his willingness to part with good times when faced with the choice of bowing to dictation. He quit the newspaper twice, on both occasions after developing differences with the management.
His independence of mind and thought, and his overtly leftist leanings precluded any compromise with the military dictator, Ziaul Haq. He was offered a government job, but instead he chose exile. This is how he became the editor of Kuwait Times.
The way for his return to the country was paved a decade later by the crash of a C-130 aircraft outside Bahawalpur that killed Gen Zia.
When I was a budding journalist, he always insisted to see me in the front row of a media event. Courage, he said, had no parallel in this game of words – written or spoken. He was immensely proud of me when I joined the BBC at the turn of the millennium.
His personal friends, and those who are acquainted with him through his writings, still recognize him as a no-nonsense journalist, fiercely independent and un-forgivingly outspoken. For us in the family, fear was alien to his chemistry.
He suffered for his differences with General Ayub Khan, and later for his disagreements with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. I remember this as a child that at one point he asked my father – his younger brother – to wash a whole carton of premier Scotch whisky down the bathroom flush because, in his words, it was meant to corrupt him. The carton had been sent as a gift by Gen Ayub. No wonder, a man who was born in an affluent family in the British Raj, died in a rented house and left virtually nothing to his widow and his only daughter.
But that has not prevented the larger Jafri family from appreciating the values that he stood for. He always insisted that freedom of expression was too fragile to survive the smallest compromise, but too strong for the dictators’ fiats to subdue, and that it was up to us to choose which course to take. He used to say that no price was too high to pay for this freedom. We have had some second-generation journalists in the family, and I like to think that we have tried to match ABS’s values.
And I wish that he also serves as a beacon for the rest of Pakistan’s highly promising and equally independent-minded journalists of the younger generation, who are the harbingers of our future.
The writer is a journalist worked for BBC and a niece of ABS Jafri
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