BackWhy ‘the boys’ are gunning for ‘Dawn’ columnist Cyril Almeida
The timing of 'Dawn' columnist Cyril Almeida's report amid the escalating tension with India over the sovereignty of Kashmir has raised the hackles of Pakistani army
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New Delhi: Pakistani journalist and Dawn columnist Cyril Almeida has quite a reputation among his peers—variously described as “top Pakistani journalist" and “widely respected". One of the things that made him famous is his seeming irreverence for the powerful Pakistani military—referring to them simply as “the boys."
That being passé—the Pakistani journalist of Goan (yes you read it right) origin is currently in the news because he “broke" a story in the Dawn newspaper (founded by Pakistan’s founding father Mohammed Ali Jinnah) on 6 October in which he reported that the Nawaz Sharif government had issued a blunt warning to the country’s all-powerful military that Islamabad faced isolation unless it acted against home-grown terrorism.
What he said was not exactly new, said a former Indian diplomat posted in Islamabad. What was interesting, though, was the timing of Almeida’s report, coming as it did in the middle of tensions with India over the sovereignty of Kashmir.
It also comes exactly a week after India said it had conducted “surgical strikes" across the de facto line of control border dividing Kashmir into Indian and Pakistan administered zones. Coincidentally, it also follows a campaign by India to diplomatically isolate Pakistan for backing terrorism and nurturing terrorist groups on its soil, led by no less than Prime Minister Narendra Modi. (Pakistan, too, is running a diplomatic campaign against India for its alleged human rights violations in Indian-administered Kashmir.)
On Almeida, the former Indian diplomat said he had a good reputation as a journalist. But “the Indians seemed to take him more seriously than the Pakistanis," he said.
On Almeida’s scoop, the former diplomat said that “the story that he wrote is entirely plausible".
“What the civilian government reportedly said about fighting terrorism has been stated before. There is tension in the air in Pakistan, a new army chief has to be named soon (November is when incumbent Raheel Sharif completes his term.) Nobody really knows what is happening, which is true for most times in Pakistan, but this time there is some tension in the air," he said.
Predictably, Almeida’s report made it to the front pages of all prominent Indian newspapers and equally predictably, raised a furore at home.
The Nawaz Sharif government issued not one but three denials—interpreted by some analysts in India as a sign that the government was feeling the heat from the military. (Relations between Pakistan’s civilian government and the military have often been tumultuous with many coups since independence. Nawaz Sharif’s government took office in 2013 in the first-ever civilian to civilian transfer of power—recorded in international newspapers as a milestone in Pakistani history.)
Not completely surprising then that Almeida was placed on the “exit control list" – which makes it impossible for him to leave the country. (Rumour has it that it was an attempt to prevent Almeida from touching base with foreign journalists, institutions and think-tanks not to mention governments curious about the relationship between Pakistan’s civilian government and military).
In the words of another journalist Najam Sethi, editor of Pakistan’s Friday Times, “the Civ-Mil Estab has given the international media a bigger story by stupidly targeting Cyril/Dawn."
“Media must stand by @cyalm and @dawn_com," he said in a Tweet on Tuesday.
The Dawn’s management has stuck by Almeida and the story it published. “As gatekeeper of information that was ‘verified, cross-checked and fact-checked’, the editor of this paper bears sole responsibility for the story in question. The government should at once remove Mr Almeida’s name from the ECL (exit control list)and salvage some of its dignity," it said in a post on the homepage of Dawn’s website on Wednesday.
That Pakistan is a tough place for journalists is well known. “Reporters without Borders" earlier this year ranked Pakistan 147th out of 180 countries for press freedom, the lowest position in south Asia.
Hailing from a Pakistan-Goan family with its base in Karachi, Almeida, in his late 40s, completed a Bachelor’s degree in Law from England before returning to Pakistan to practice law. In an interview published in the asiancorrespondent.com website in 2009, Almeida, who usually sports a stubble, recounted that he returned to Pakistan and found a position in “small (law) firm" in Karachi. “A year and change later, I had serious doubts about whether I wanted to be in the profession 10, 15, 20 years down the road," he said in the written interview.
Though he enjoyed law as a subject, “the practice of law is a very different, dare I say, deadening, experience for the most part. Having doubts about the profession generally, I realised it was relatively less painful to leave early on, rather than be stuck doing something I didn’t enjoy for the rest (or a major chunk) of my life," Almeida said in his interview.
“The media was something I was attracted to. I enjoy politics, political history, trying to make sense of where the country is headed, etc. and I like writing, so it eventually became a no-brainer," he added.
The perks of being a journalist according to him include no office hours, writing from any part of the country or the world, spending the day just reading or meeting interesting people.
News reports say Almeida first visited Goa only in 2012 to participate in Goa Arts and Literary Festival (GALF), and then followed it up with two more visits, the last one in December 2015. The Almeida family reportedly still speaks Konkani at home, though Almeida himself is familiar with English and Urdu, the reports said.
But it is Almeida’s daringly critical and incisive pieces on the Pakistan military and state of affairs in the country that seems to have won him legions of fans in India.
Sample this: his addressing the all powerful Pakistani army chief, Raheel Sharif, simply as “Raheel."
Or an article, in the immediate aftermath of the Peshawar Military Academy attack in December 2014, which stated: “Ultimately, Pakistan’s problem with militancy is not denial. It is not even ignorance. It is something quite different. Simply, it is the widespread belief that militants fighting the Indian state, militants fighting to free “Indian-held Kashmir", militants fighting the Afghan government and militants fighting to “free" Afghanistan are not militants. They are the good guys. The righteous ones brave enough to take on the world in the name of the one true God."
“He’s an incredible journalist, extremely courageous, reporting regularly on relations between the government and the military," says former Indian high commissioner to Pakistan G. Parthasarthy. “I hold him in very high regard."
That it was the Dawn that carried the story made it more credible than a leak to an Urdu paper, Parthasarthy said. “The Dawn is one of the most respected Pakistani papers internationally, there is no reason to doubt its veracity," he said.
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