Lt General Ghulam Ahmad died tragically in a car accident last week. He was Chief of Staff at the Chief Executive’s secretariat. He belonged to the Armoured Corps and served as head of the ISI’s Internal Wing from 1998-2000. He leaves behind a wife, two sons and two daughters
I first met him in an ISI hideout somewhere in Rawalpindi in May 1999. A clean-cut, genial man, he sported aviator glasses and was decked out in a colourful bush shirt and tan trousers. Not exactly your deadly hush-hush sort-of-spook, I thought, since he seemed relaxed and reassuring.
“Sethi Sahab”, he said, firmly shaking my hand, but without introducing himself, “I’ve arranged for your wife and lawyers to meet you. Please come with me. I hope you don’t mind if I sit in the room with you”. And then, without further ado, he ushered me into the company of my wife Jugnu, and my lawyer-friends Dr Khalid Ranjha, Asma Jehangir and Shabbar Raza Rizvi. At the conclusion of our meeting, Jugnu told me that my mother sent her love and was anxious about my well-being. General GA heard her and said: “Sethi Sahab, why don’t you call your mother?” The colonel who was my minder then took me to the room next door and I spoke briefly to my ailing mother.
I was brutally kidnapped from my home in Lahore by the Punjab police and Intelligence Bureau in the early hours of May 8th, 1999, roughed up in custody and handed over to the ISI. But the ISI handled me with kid gloves, as though instructed by its “higher-ups” to be careful. I was lodged in a “safe” house, a doctor checked me out and prescribed medicines. My minders were two bright ISI colonels and a youthful captain — polite, poker-faced, confident. “Don’t worry, everything will be OK”, was their constant reassuring refrain.
General GA, I learnt subsequently, was head of the internal political wing of the ISI in Islamabad. He was posted to the secret service in 1998 by the then army chief, General Jehangir Karamat. When the then prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, personally called up the then DG-ISI, General Ziauddin Butt, and ordered him to arrest and court martial me, it was to General GA that the DG-ISI turned for advice and compliance. GA called up Brigadier Ijaz Shah (now our untiring home secretary Punjab), then head of the ISI in Lahore, and briefed him about the situation. But Mr Sharif’s vicious henchman, Saif-ur-Rehman, thought the ISI was dragging its feet. So he coordinated with the Punjab chief minister, Shahbaz Sharif, and jumped the gun. Apparently, I had to be taught a lesson so that others of my ilk would not become so audacious.
During my “captivity”, I came to one confusing conclusion. The prime minister and Saif-ur-Rahman wanted to lock me up and throw away the key. But the army and ISI — from General Musharraf to Brigadier (now Major General) Rashid Qureshi, Brigadier Ijaz Shah and General GA — thought otherwise. The ISI did not share Sharif’s hostility towards me. It made no attempt to intimidate or coerce me into making a false “confession”. Indeed, it actually refused to hand me over to the IB for “interrogation” when Saif-ur-Rehman made the demand. More critically, it did not agree with the prime minister that I should be court-martialed. How was this possible, I thought, wasn’t General Ziauddin Butt, the DG-ISI, handpicked by Sharif and bound to do his bidding? What was going on?
The answers were partly and indirectly provided by GA in a long afternoon session that we had together in the last week of May in my “safe house” in Pindi. He was in uniform this time. He told me how General Musharraf , whom I didn’t know from Adam at the time, had refused to sanction my court-martial, despite pressure from the government, how the ISI in general, and GA in particular, didn’t like to be “used” for anyone’s personal vendettas. We also talked about the content of a rather candid speech that I had made at the National Defence College six months earlier about the multiple crises facing Pakistan. This had now become the pretext for action against me by the Sharif government on the grounds that when I aired it in New Delhi I was acting in a treasonable manner. GA thought I should have been more circumspect but it certainly didn’t amount to treason by any stretch of the imagination. “You’ve been writing some pretty strong stuff against him”, he added, referring to Nawaz Sharif. “Is it all true?” he mocked, his eyes hinting at mischief.
But one small detail seemed to intrigue him. In my so-called “controversial” speech, I had, in a rhetorical flourish, written that “there is only one modern-day ideology over whose application there can be no bitter or divisive controversies, and which will be acceptable to all Pakistanis, irrespective of caste, creed, gender, region, ethnicity, sect, etc. And that is the ideology of economic growth, the ideology of full employment, the ideology of distributive justice and social welfare”. Expanding on the theme, I had suggested that “Pakistan should make this ideology the ideology of the state and thereby bury all false consciousness and false ideologies”. GA wanted me to explain the gist of this construction. He was especially keen to know what I had meant by “ideology” in this context. When I explained the “idea” of economic revival and reconstruction as being central to building modern nationhood, he nodded thoughtfully.
Discussion over, he got up to leave, shook my hand, looked me in the eye and said matter-of-factly: “Sethi Sahab, I shall submit my report to my DG in a day or two. It shall be brief. No one can force me to write against the facts”.
One week later, the government was forced to concede before the Supreme Court that it had no case against me and I was a free man again. In an interview to the BBC, I attributed my arrest to the prime minister and my freedom to, among the many others who fought for me, the ISI and the Pakistani army chief who refused to be exploited for political purposes. Many people were confused by this statement because they had all too easily believed the government’s propaganda that I had been detained by the ISI for “anti-national” activities.
But my “association” with GA was not yet over. When Amnesty International invited me to Britain to accept an award for Journalism Under Threat, I called up GA and asked him to facilitate the return of my passport which lay with the ISI. He promised to “try his best” but indicated that the IB was pressurising him to hand over the passport to Saif-ur-Rehman. In due course, however, it was quietly handed back to me by the ISI with the request that I should not make a song and dance about it.
GA was promoted to Lt Gen and made Chief of Staff to General Musharraf last year. His appointment reflected his strengths as a gatekeeper to the most powerful man in Pakistan just as much as it reflected the temperament of his boss. GA was, as Major General Rashid Qureshi put it, “someone with his feet firmly planted on the ground, down to earth, realistic above everything else”. He was hardworking, intelligent (but without the pretense of being an intellectual), candid in his opinion but never expansive or intrusive. He never had a bad word to say about anyone.
In the brief moments that I spent with him, I saw all these qualities in the man. But I also felt he was a deeply compassionate and fair-minded person. Everyone testifies to his modesty and humility. He was barely two years away from retirement, yet had not even begun to build his retirement nest. Whenever his wife would express her anxiety on this score, he would gently chide her by saying “My dear, do you have any problems?”
I last met him on July 13, when General Pervez Musharraf invited the leading editors of the country for a pre-Agra chat in Islamabad. During the meeting, I noticed that he made a note in his pad only when someone made an original or meaningful comment, for the most part hearing out our ramblings with a poker face. After the meeting, he came over to embrace me warmly.
“I hope you’re accompanying the Chief to Agra”, I said. “If he wants me to, sir, I shall certainly do so”. General Rashid Qureshi tells me that GA was a model of restraint and sobriety in India as all around him hopes soared and fell, and nerves were frayed. That was so typical of GA. He was, as they say, a good and true man. We shall all miss him. May God bless his soul.