THIS is with reference to the obituaries of Zafarullah Poshni and Hassan Sangrami (Oct 7). With regard to the former, the reference to the 1951 Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case in the story deserved better treatment. Whatever one’s opinion about the purported conspiracy, it is part of our history and we must know the facts.

Besides the military officials taken into custody, a large number of civilians were also arrested. They included the late Ahmad Ali Khan, who was Dawn’s editor for 28 years. He was then at Pakistan Times, Lahore. Also arrested was another Dawn man, the late Ghayurul Islam, who later re-joined Dawn in the 1980s as editor of the weekly Economic and Business Review.

Those who were charged with conspiracy and tried, besides Mr Poshni, included Maj-Gen Akbar Khan, Air Cdre M.K. Janjua, Maj-Gen Nazir Ahmad, Brig Abdul Latif Khan and Brig Sadiq Khan.

The four civilians were Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Mrs Nasim Akbar Khan, Pakistan Communist Party Secretary-General Sajjad Zaheer and Mohammad Hussain Ata, a communist leader from what is now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Mr Ahmad Ali Khan was never tried, but was arrested because he used to ‘receive’ Sajjad Zaheer at his home and never informed the police about it. Other journalists arrested included Ahmad Nadeem Qasimi, Zaheer Babar and Hameed Akhtar. Mr Khan was held incommunicado for six or so weeks.

One day the deputy chief of the Central Intelligence Department (CID), Mian Anwar Ali, came on a visit to the prison and was shocked by Mr Khan’s physical and sartorial condition. While standing in front of the door made of iron bars, Mian Anwar delivered a lecture on the virtues of patriotism and the difficulties the country was facing because of “people like you.” As the two argued, Mr Khan, never short of humour, reminded the senior CID official that the dialogue between them was unequal since he (Mr Khan) was standing on the wrong side of the bars. The details of the conspiracy case can be seen in Mr Khan’s autobiography, In Search of Sense: My Years as a Journalist. May God bless all the conspirators and their persecutors!

Mr Poshni was a great man as the obituary and the ad in next day’s Dawn amply showed. Besides being an author he was a prolific writer of letters to the editor until the late 1980s.

The other obituary was about my photographer-friend, Hassan ul Haq alias Sangrami. Few people know how he came to be called Sangrami. ‘Sangram’ is a Bengali word meaning ‘struggle’, ‘fight’, etc. During the journalists’ historic struggle in 1970 under the leadership of Minhaj Barna and K.G. Mustafa, the slogans included one in Bengali — Shongram, shongram, chal-bay, chal-bay (the struggle continues). Hassan used to be so vociferous in chanting the slogan that the word got associated with his name and colleagues started calling him Sangrami.

He was a competent press photographer and had a lively sense of humour. He finds repeated mention in Jeevan Aik Kahani, a page-turner autobiography by veteran print and radio journalist, Ali Ahmad Khan, who lost several family members in the 1971 holocaust.

A journalist
Karachi

Published in Dawn, October 11th, 2021