I met her in 1986. She was Editor then of the Herald, a magazine she had elevated from a society rag to one of the best English language monthlies in the world. She seemed unusually modest, looking like a middle class housewife, a school mistress, or a nurse off duty. Her quiet humility veiled her genius. It was difficult on first encounter to anticipate the large brain on her small shoulders, or to imagine the grit of character, her awesome integrity.
Our first encounter revealed an unusual commitment to originality, to pursuit of excellence, and the uncompromisingly high professional standards she observed as an editor. "Please write for us Doctor Sahib", she had said within minutes of arriving, making it clear that the purpose of her visit was professional, "Any thing you wish to write, we shall be happy to read." I was struck by her choice of words. Like all good editors she did not promise to publish "anything" I wrote. I offered her an article that I had just completed saying "It is long. You may want to serialize it." Razia glanced at the article, found it "most interesting", then rejected it upon learning that it was to appear soon in the New Yorker. "We do not reprint published material", she announced. "But there is no overlap between American and Pakistani readership" I had exclaimed in amazement. And Razia Bhatti had responded: "It does not matter. Our policy is to not use second hand material." Soon thereafter, Herald published an interview with me that had been edited with greater excellence than I had experienced from well known publications in Europe and America, and which exhibited more courage in Ziaul Haq's unpleasant days than any editor had dared. She will crash, I had thought then, or else she will help transform journalism in Pakistan. She did both.
When I saw her next she was out of the Herald, and struggling to start another magazine with nothing more than her loyal team of young journalists, and the enormous goodwill she commanded among readers who recognized in her a national resource. Newsline began publication on a shoe-string budget and within months emerged as a lean, muscular, and punchy competitor on the publishing block. It broke more stories, exposed more wrongs, withstood enormous pressures to retract this story and that allegation, and won more awards, national and international, than any other magazine in Pakistan, among them the coveted international award for Courage in Journalism of which Razia Bhatti was the recipient in 1994.
She was an editors' editor. She had an uncanny instinct for the important story, an extraordinary insight into the event, however obscure, that would make a difference to society and its future. Nearly every copy of the magazines she edited was a news breaker. Nearly every issue was worth preserving on the shelf. In an era when journalism has taken leave, worldwide, of history and analysis Razia linked contemporary events to the past no less than the future. I look around in my study for copies of Newsline as one looks for letters and photos of a departed friend. Only a few old ones are here, and in each Razia's short editorial provides a pointer to our political culture of violence and venality no less than a model of journalistic courage. She introduced the story on Jam Sadiq's reign in March 1991: "Once again the era of the midnight knock has dawned in Sindh...In his single-minded pursuit of a goal he recognises no frontiers. ... Only Jam Sadiq could turn brazenness into a virtue and terror into necessity."
The next issue, April 1991, reports on violence including MQM's assaults on the press and journalists. Razia wrote: "Perhaps it is a barometer of Pakistani society today that the recurring themes in three of the major stories in this month's Newsline is violence: violence against the press, violence against those holding different religious beliefs, and violence against children." She spared no one who deserved criticism: "The media barons who have made their millions through publishing could not voice even a protest at the assault on the workers who helped build their empires. It was an unconditional surrender at Azizabad -- and the final ignominy was that it came in the early hours of Pakistan Day." Hope always triumphed with her over disillusionment: "But the attack on Zafar Abbas may eventually come to be seen as a watershed in the history of the Pakistani press." By year's end her magazine had given us the most consistent record of the excesses which were committed during the reign of Ghulam Ishaque Khan, Nawaz Sharif and Jam Sadiq. But again she did not fail to note the positive in December 1991: "But from the depths of degradation has risen the imperishable phoenix of courage. Those supposed to have been shamed into silence ... have raised a voice for the countless unknowns who have died a thousand living deaths in silence."
In a country where party politics take precedence over people's anguish in newsrooms no less than society's salons, Razia was among the few to whom politics held no meaning outside the context of public interest. Her magazine bagged several awards for its coverage of the protracted shenanigans that brought down both Nawaz Sharif and President Ghulam Ishaque Khan. But her priorities remained clear: "All this frenetic political activity", she wrote in March 1993, " has added up to a tremendous amount of sound and fury, signifying nothing for the masses. At the end of the day, 65% of our people are illiterate, 45% are without access to minimal health care, 55% have no access to clean water, 80% are without access to sanitation, and 30% live below the poverty line. One child dies every minute in this country generally from preventable diseases, and over 30,000 women die in child birth ... 45 years after independence, Pakistan ranks 120th on the world's human development chart... The statistics shame us, but the reality does not stop at statistics...." Razia never forgot what our rulers can never remember: the sorrows of our people. For her pains she was pilloried and harassed by governments from Zia to Bhutto.
The mean spirits of our politicians converged around Razia Bhatti. She was always in official disfavor. She understood, better than most of us, that the relationship between power and the press must necessarily be adversarial if the latter is to fulfill its professional and moral obligations to the public. That tension obtains every where. In dictatorships it yields repression. In democracies it is mediated by constitutional guarantees of press freedom, and humanized by a shared conviction that the public interest must take precedence over private piques and personal grudges. But ours is a democracy without democrats where women and men in power confuse the personal with the public interest, and use national resources as though they were inexhaustible family possessions. It is this mentality which underlies the extra-ordinary venality of our elected officials. Nearly all have a price tag on them. "They call it horse trading", Razia had written in June 1993, "but horses serve more faithfully than our public representatives those to whom they owe their daily bread." The lota is merely a metaphor for the commodification of politics in Pakistan.
Razia Bhatti was a crusader for the public interest. Typically, our political leaders applauded her when they were in opposition, and hounded her when they were in power. Occasionally, both sides had cause to complain. In September 1991 her magazine had The Great Loan Scandal on its cover. "In August 1990", she wrote, Newsline ran an investigative report on the plunder of the country's financial institutions by the Zardaris and their cronies. A year later a sense of deja vu sets in as history repeats under a new face and a new name...Democracy is preached and power sought in the name of the people, but the imperatives of power change in office. Misuse of power was one of the charges against Benazir Bhutto's government. But accountability is not a one-eyed process." Change the names around, the editorial will hold good for some time to come.
She had looked exhausted when we met last. Ms. Bhutto's government had been inflicting punishments. Newsline disappeared from PIA flights. Then there was a nightly raid on her modest apartment in Clifton. The gutsy woman was upset, not frightened. Her children had been terrified. Mohammed Hanif, an ace young reporter, had been similarly harassed, and FIRs were filed against them. They had caused displeasure to the Governor of Sindh who, I am assured by mutual friends, is otherwise an educated man. On people who confuse the public and private domains, education makes but a marginal impact. While we talked, a message arrived: the Governor shall withdraw the cases if Newsline shall apologize. The messenger did not have to wait long for Razia's response: `We shall fight', she said. Her legacy, I am sure, shall live. (END)
@ Eqbal Ahmad. March 15, 1996