Jasarat
Daily Jasarat originally started in March 1970 from Multan, a city in central Pakistan, but soon its operations were shut down because of a country-wide strike by journalists over working conditions. The agitation continued for 24 days and resulted in no newspaper being published across Pakistan for most of that time. After the striking journalists came back to work, daily Jasarat resumed its publication – not from Multan but from Karachi.
A few months later when the military government of Yahya Khan announced the holding of Pakistan’s first country-wide parliamentary elections on the basis of adult franchise, daily Jasarat became the official mouthpiece of Jamaat-e-Islami. It has been performing the same role since then, propagating rightwing Islamist ideas and opposing leftwing and liberal politics in Pakistan.
Daily Jasarat, thus, is an exception in today’s market-driven news media industry in Pakistan. Its coverage of news and its editorial line both faithfully toe the political stance of the party that it is associated with.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s civilian government that came into power after the 1970 elections banned the newspaper multiple times between 1972 and 1976. The last of these bans resulted in its closure for more than a year.
After Bhutto’s removal from the office of prime minister in a military coup in 1977, the newspaper was revived but soon its editor, Maulana Salahuddin, and its sponsor, Jamaat-e-Islami, developed differences over whether or not to support the government of General Ziaul Haq. While the editor was close to the general, the party wanted an end to his military rule and sought the revival of democratic and electoral politics in the country. This led to Maulana Salahuddin’s departure from the newspaper.
After his exist, the newspaper lost a big chunk of its readers who started following Takbeer, a weekly magazine that Maulana Salahuddin launched to support Ziaul Haq’s domestic policies of Islamising the society and his foreign policy of waging a holy war – along with the West and Saudi Arabia – in Afghanistan against the Soviet forces there.
Over the last four decades, daily Jasarat has continuously lost readership in tandem with the waning popular support for Jamaat-e-Islami. The start of daily Ummat in the 1990s also dealt it a major blow and deprived it of a large portion of its audience, particularly in Karachi.
Audience Share
1%
Ownership Type
Private
Geographic Coverage
National
Content Type
Paid Content (PKR 16)
Media Companies / Groups
Azad Papers Private Limited
Ownership Structure
Daily Jasarat is owned by Azad Papers Private Limited, 98.40% shares of which are owned by Islamic Research Academy, a Karachi-based think tank ideologically affiliated with Jamaat-e-Islami. The remaining shares are owned by six individuals – Muslim Pervaiz (0.61%), Shahid Hashmi (0.49%), M Tanveer Magon (0.12%), Dr Abdul Wasay Shakir (0.12%), Birjees Ahmed (0.12%) and Shamim Pasha (0.12%) – who are all members of Jamaat-e-Islami.
Voting Rights
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Individual Owner
Group / Individual Owner
Mian Muslim Pervaiz
Mian Muslim Pervaiz is a senior member of Jamaat-e-Islami. He has led his party’s councillors in Karachi’s elected city council between 2001 and 2005 when another Jamaat-e-Islami leader, Naimatullah Khan, served as the city’s nazim (mayor).
Muslim Pervaiz has also worked as the chief executive officer of daily Jasarat in the recent past.
Shahid Hashmi
Shahid Hashmi is a senior ideologue of Jamaat-e-Islami. He is also a director of Islamic Research Academy. He comes from a family of intellectuals. His father was a short story writer and the editor of a literary journal but, unlike his son, he followed a leftist ideology.
General Information
Founding Year
1970
Affiliated Interests Founder
A senior leader of a rightwing Islamist political party, Jamaat-e-Islami, he was politically active in the1960s in an opposition movement against the rule of Pakistan’s first military dictator General Ayub Khan.
Towards the end of the same decade, he reached the post of his party’s chief in the country’s largest city, Karachi. Since he was a man of vast means, Jamaat-e-Islami’s top leadership asked him to finance a daily newspaper to propagate the party‘s viewpoint to the public. It was largely with his donation of money that daily Jasarat came about.
Affiliated Interests Ceo
A physician at the Aga Khan University Hospital, Karachi, he is also the president of Pakistan Society of Neurology and a naib ameer (vice president) of Jamaat-e-Islami in Karachi.
Affiliated Interests Editor-In-Chief
Having worked in various newspapers including Hurriyat, a prominent Urdu daily in Karachi during the 1960s and the 1970s, he has been associated with daily Jasarat for the last 30 years or so.
Affiliated Interests other important people
A rightwing ideologue originally affiliated with Jamaat-e-Islami, he was the founding editor of daily Jasarat. The newspaper under him immediately became the champion of an Islamic nationalist ideology and partook aggressively in the intellectual and political confrontations with leftist liberal politics of the time.
Maulana Salahuddin had a publicly known animus towards Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who headed the Pakistani government in 1971-77, and his Pakistan Peoples’ Party. When Bhutto became the President of Pakistan in December 1971, Maulana Salahuddin wrote a number of editorials strongly criticizing his politics and policies. Bhutto would shut down daily Jasarat and send him to prison several times between 1972 and 1976.
Maulana Salahuddin quit daily Jasarat after developing differences with the leadership of Jamaat-e-Islami in 1983. Next year, he started publishing his own weekly magazine, Takbeer, from Karachi.
Maulana Salahuddin was also extremely critical of the politics of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, a party which claims to represent the descendants of Urdu-speaking migrants who had come to Pakistan from various parts of India in 1947. His magazine often linked the party to ethnic and political violence in the city and also reported about its alleged connections with organized crime.
In 1994, he was murdered outside the headquarters of Takbeer allegedly by some Muttahida Qaumi Movement members. His son-in-law Abdul Rafiq Afghan would later take over the magazine though not before a brief tussle with its senior editorial staff as well as with his own wife over its ownership. He later also founded an Urdu daily, Ummat.
Contact
Syed House, 3rd Floor, Opp. Bombay Hotel Building,
I I Chundrigar Road, Karachi
Tel: 92-(0)21-32630391-4
Fax: 92-(0)21-32629344
Website: www.jasarat.com
Financial Information
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Further Information
Meta Data
The outlet was sent information request on 14 January 2019 through a courier company as well as by email. It did not respond even after a reminder was couriered on 1st February 2019 and emailed on 4 February 2019. No verified online information is available about daily Jasarat’s ownership structure and its financial status.
The data obtained from SECP also does not provide information about its latest financial status.
Interviews were conducted with Shahid Hashmi, a member of board of directors of Azad Papers Private Limited that owns and runs daily Jasarat and with Muzaffar Ejaz, a senior member of daily Jasarat’s editorial board.
