‘News coverage is given to the elite, not the masses

The Sindh Institute of Urology & Transplantation’s Centre of Biomedical Ethics & Culture took a stroll through civil servant and Urdu poet Syed Mustafa Zaidi’s life and death on Saturday evening. The forum had investigative journalists Saba Imtiaz and Tooba Masood speak at length on Zaidi’s life and mysterious death.

Using this lens, they provided a glimpse into the politics, socialite culture, activism and gender dynamics in Pakistan during the 1970s and how the news of murders was mostly elite-centric.

The session, which was titled ‘Once Upon a Time in Pakistan: Poetry, Politics and the People of the 70s’, also featured recitals of Zaidi’s poetry. Saba Imtiaz is a freelance journalist, author and researcher. She writes about culture, urban life, food and religion. She is the author of the novel ‘Karachi, You’re Killing Me!’ that was adapted into the Indian film ‘Noor’. She has reported features from Pakistan, Jordan, Afghanistan and Lebanon. She is currently based in The Netherlands.

Tooba Masood-Khan is a multimedia journalist and reporter. She has worked for two leading English dailies of Pakistan. She writes about Karachi’s archives and history, including the city’s cinemas, and pre-independence buildings and markets. She was long-listed for the Zeenat Haroon Rashid Writing Prize for Women in 2020. She is a graduate of SOAS University of London. Both Saba and Tooba are currently co-producing and co-hosting a podcast ‘Notes on a Scandal’ that has gained national and international attention. They are also co-authors of a book project titled ‘Society Girl’.

During the forum Saba shared how Zaidi had suicidal tendencies. She said that there is a strong perception that his death was a suicide. Back in the 1970s, there was no debate or discussion on mental health as such, she added. She believed that Zaidi’s conversation revolved around things that would reflect that he was somehow depressed.

Zaidi was 40 years old when he was found dead on October 12, 1970, in a hotel room in Karachi. Shahnaz Gul, a married socialite, who was the subject of his myriad poems. She was found unconscious in another room of the flat in which Zaidi lived.

Saba shared how Zaidi even had rivalries among the poetic community and how he was a different person in the 1950s but he had changed by the 1970s. There are several theories on Zaidi’s death - one was that he was poisoned, another that he killed himself or that Shahnaz let someone in to do the job.

...who Tooba shared was so pretty that when the case was being heard in court, people used to go to court just to catch a glimpse of her.

In response to a question about how the case would be covered in the media/social media today, Tooba said that it would have been worse than the coverage in the 70s.

Speaking about how news coverage is given to the elites and not the masses, Tooba pointed out that when she was working at one of the English dailies, a crime news related to a common man would get a single column or a word count of a few hundred. However, she said, high-profile cases such as the Noor Mukadam and Sara Inam murders get full-blown coverage. Even the public wants to read about such cases and what kind of treatment Zahir Jaffer was meted out in jail, she added.