Ahmad Ali Khan was the editor of daily Dawn for about twenty four years, the longest stint by any editor of any English daily in Pakistan. As is well-known, the task of an editor in this country has never been easy. The governments and pressure groups weigh down on the editorial policy and on the owners in more ways than one -- to either curb the freedom of the press or to tailor it to suit their ends.
So it is fascinating to read the account from the horse’s mouth as to how Ahmad Ali Khan survived as the editor of the leading newspaper in the times which, like all times in Pakistan, could only be termed as turbulent.
One basic characteristic of the memoirs is its unpretentiousness. Usually people in high offices or positions of power write their memoirs to justify what they did in their professional lives or to offer an apologetic defence of some of the decisions that they took. It is an exercise mostly in self-justification and of washing the dirty linen in public in trying to remove the stains that others have besmeared their clothes with.
Though he has offered many justifications to some of the more controversial decisions that he took as a journalist, the best thing is that he has been candid about certain steps being indefensible and has even gone to the extent of being contrite about them.
One such decision was assuming the charge of the editorship after the Progressive Papers Limited was taken over by the government in 1959. Faiz Ahmed Faiz was sent to jail after the declaration of the martial law in the country and Mazhar Ali Khan, the next in line, refused to take over the editorship and went home instead in protest. The baton passed on to Ahmad Ali Khan who decided to stay on for three years. He calls this a mistake that he has regretted ever since.
It may have been the consequence of what he has mentioned as the constant tension between the editorial policy of a paper and the independent thinking processes of a journalist or an editor. But mercifully this professional hazard was not advanced as a sop.
But the real value of the memoirs is that it offers a clear and candid picture of the political life of the years that Pakistan has been in existence. A journalist is not a professional politician but he or she is always there to report and criticise with an ongoing temptation to be co-opted into the system. Ahmad Ali Khan was a witness to that and he recounts the gradual deterioration of the profession and the editor’s position as a result of the politicians not playing the game of politics according to rules.
Journalists should as a rule stay away from politicians, civil and military bureaucrats; otherwise, the independence in reporting objectively about the government is compromised. One such example that he has quoted is that of his own editor Altaf Hussain who highly admired for his integrity and professionalism gradually got too close to the corridors of power, even becoming the minister for industries during the reign of Ayub Khan. Ahmad Ali Khan’s years as editor saw him negotiating the very tough periods of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Zai ul Haq, and then later the challenges faced by the opening of the media and its growing commercialism.
The best part of the book is the period leading to partition and the political life in the last years of colonial rule: his life as a youngster in Bhopal; the various influences that went into the maturation of his consciousness and personality and the years of his stints in Aligarh and the Lucknow College before stepping into the shoes of a journalist.
He also could see the various weaknesses and strengths of the political parties as they struggled to free India of colonial yoke. He could see the weakness of the Muslim League as it battled to carve a niche for the homeland of the Muslims in the independence struggle.
He grew up to be left-leaning like so many other youngsters of that era. Gradually, he became disillusioned by the changing international scenario. With the passage of time, he was weaned out of his romance by the rising tensions in international power politics, while also not being totally enamoured of some of the policies that were formulated by the Soviet Union. His criticism of the alignments that followed the Second World War too is quite ruthless, for those might have been seen in a positive light on the world stage but proved to be disastrous for all those working in regions and in individual countries. The over-centralisation did not give enough freedom to the local and national players to frame and execute their own policies.
He has written about the weakness of Pakistani journalism -- the lack of resources, the inability to collect and verify news, lack of investigative reporting. He lauds the role of the unions in upholding the virtues of the profession and then its gradual downfall with the editors becoming proprietors and proprietors becoming editors; thus being in positions to control the editorial policy and the unions.
Actually, it was the absence of an overarching umbrella of ideological commitment that made him first enter a phase of skepticism and then to be fully disillusioned with the once-espoused ideology adhered to almost like a religious belief. In the absence of such an overarching ideological shelter, the inspiration or the compulsion to continue with the task at hand lacked zest. Quoting Marion Doenhoff, the first lady of German journalism from Die Zeit, two months before the Berlin Wall came down "the defeat of Marxism does not mean the triumph of capitalism" led to the question then what next. This quotation may have offered some consolation but left the road to the future totally unmarked.
Like the hardcore socialists or traditionalists of yore, there is hardly any mention of the family other than the father, the mother and the brothers. His was a divided family due to partition. Of his own nuclear family, there is total silence as he does not discuss his wife or the children at all and probably does not bring them into the equation of his commitments. Though his letters or what others close to him wrote about him published in the second section do expose his human underbelly, he has said nothing himself because as it has often happened, the compulsion to keep the family intact and unruffled has often forced many a compromise in the face of extreme adversity.