Najam Sethi

Sethi was born and raised in Lahore into a Punjabi family of the Khatri community. He graduated from Government College, Lahore (now Government College University), in 1967, earning the President's Gold Medal for achieving the highest academic distinction among more than 50,000 students of the University of the Punjab. He went on to complete a Master of Arts degree in Economics and Politics at the University of Cambridge in 1970. From 1971 to 1972, he was a PhD research student at Clare College, Cambridge. In 2011, Clare College named him Alumnus of the Year and awarded him an honorary Eric Lane Fellowship.

Early years

In 1984, he was detained for one month under "preventive detention" by the military regime of General Zia-ul-Haq, without being formally charged with any crime. The detention was widely believed to be linked to the publication of From Jinnah to Zia, a book released by Vanguard Books and authored by former chief justice of Pakistan, Mohammad Munir. In the book, Justice Munir reflected critically on his own role in validating Pakistan's first martial law in 1958, a precedent that many viewed as enabling General Zia's imposition of martial law in 1977.

According to Sethi, he first conceived of the idea for an independent Pakistani newspaper out of frustration: while briefly imprisoned in 1984 on trumped-up copyright charges, no newspapers had protested his arrest. The following year, he and Mohsin applied for a publishing licence under Mohsin's name, since Sethi was "too notorious an offender" to be use the application, Mohsin told him that she intended to publish "a social chit chat thing, you know, with lots of pictures of parties and weddings". It was finally approved in 1987, but Mohsin requested a one-year delay to avoid the first issue coming out during the dictatorship of General Zia ul Haq. The Friday Times' first issue appeared in May 1989.

Journalistic career

My Feudal Lord

In June 1991, Mohsin and Sethi's publishing company, Vanguard Books, released Tehmina Durrani's My Feudal Lord, a "politically explosive" book about her marriage with leading politician Mustafa Khar. In the book, Durrani alleges that Khar mistreated and abused her. It was an "instant sensation" and later became the "hottest book in Pakistan's history". Durrani signed a contract vesting foreign rights with Mohsin and giving her 50% of foreign royalties.

On 19 May 1999, however—during Sethi's one-month incommunicado detention—Durrani called a press conference to denounce him as having stolen all of her earnings from the book, stating that his actions were "an even bigger case of hypocrisy than my experience with the feudal system". Durrani sued Sethi for mental torture, and he countersued for defamation. An earlier dispute over the foreign rights had been settled out of court in 1992. A review of the contracts by the UK newspaper The Independent described Sethi as acting in good faith and described him and Mohsin as "the injured party".

In 2008, when Sethi's newspapers ran a series of editorials opposing religious fundamentalism, the Taliban threatened him with death, causing him to live under constant guard. Sethi also received death threats in July 2008 for publishing an editorial cartoon showing Umme Hasaan, principal of a girls' school, encouraging young women in burqas to "kidnap Chinese masseuses". The joke referred to Lal Masjid, the fundamentalist Masjid at which her husband Abdul Aziz Ghazi was a cleric; the mosque had kidnapped six Chinese prostitutes, leading to Ghazi's arrest.

Sethi is married to fellow journalist Jugnu Mohsin, the publisher of The Friday Times. Najam Sethi's son is writer and singer Ali Sethi while his daughter is journalist and actress Mira Sethi.

Early activism in Balochistan (1970s)

While conducting research in Pakistan for his doctoral dissertation, he was detained as a political prisoner by the government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto from 1975 to 1977, due to his opposition to military operations in Balochistan following the dismissal of elected provincial governments. Amnesty International recognized him as a political prisoner during this period. He was honorably released in 1978 when the government ordered the release of all political detainees. During the early 1970s Sethi had also been active in the Baloch armed insurgency as a fighter.

Minister for Political Affairs and Accountability (1996–1997)

He served as the Federal Minister for Political Affairs and Accountability in Pakistan's caretaker government from 1996 to 1997.

Caretaker Chief Minister of Punjab (2013)

Najam Sethi was appointed as the caretaker Chief Minister of Punjab on 26 March 2013, for the 2013 Pakistani general election, which were scheduled to be held on 11 May 2013. His name was presented by the opposition, PPP, and the governing party, PML(N) agreed on it. He was then chosen to be the caretaker chief minister. On 6 June 2013, he was replaced by the newly elected leader Shehbaz Sharif. PTI, the party that lost the 2013 elections, had accused Najam Sethi of fixing the elections in 35 constituencies and famously called them the 35 punctures.

1999 arrest

In early 1999, Sethi gave an interview to a team for the BBC television show Correspondent, which was planning to report on corruption in the Nawaz Sharif government. At the beginning of May, he was warned by contacts that his co-operation with the team was being interpreted by the Nawaz Sharif government as an attempt to destabilize it and that officials were planning Sethi's arrest. On 8 May, he was taken from his home by personnel of Punjab Police. According to Sethi's wife Mohsin, at least eight armed officers broke into the house, assaulting the family's security guards; when asked to produce a warrant, one of them threatened simply to shoot Sethi on the spot. Mohsin was tied up and left locked in another room.

Sethi was then held for almost a month without charge. He was kept incommunicado at a detention center in Lahore. Amnesty International stated its belief that his arrest was connected with his investigations into government corruption, and designated him a prisoner of conscience. The US-based Committee to Protect Journalists also sent a protest letter to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, noting the organisation's dismay "that the state continues its persecution of independent journalists", and World Bank president James Wolfensohn called Sharif to urge Sethi's release.

On 1 June, authorities charged Sethi with "Condemnation of the Creation of the State and Advocacy of Abolition of its Sovereignty" and "Promoting Enmity Between Different Groups" and transferred him to police custody. However, the following day, the Supreme Court of Pakistan ruled that the government had provided insufficient evidence to justify Sethi's detention. He was released, and the charges against him were dropped.