Tabloid tittle tattle

Few knew of Weekly Blitz until it broke the Hina Rabbani-Bilawal Bhutto “affair”. Amrita Singh speaks to its controversial editor Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury

It threatened to be the scandal of the year: on September 24, a little-known Bangladeshi tabloid reported that Pakistan’s glamorous, chador-clad, Birkin-toting, foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, 34, was romantically involved with Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, 24, the chairman of Pakistan People’s Party and President Asif Ali Zardari’s son. It sounded a little improbable. Bilawal is being groomed for a starring role in Pakistan politics because dynasty matters in South Asia; not for nothing did he add Bhutto to his surname after his mother, Benazir, was killed in December 2007. But the tabloid insisted that Khar, married and a mother of two, and Bilawal, a sureshot future leader of Pakistan, would soon leave the country and settle down in neutral Switzerland. President Zardari was enraged, it said, at his son’s dalliances and was working overtime to scuttle the romance. He had sought phone details of the duo to get to the bottom of the affair.

Khar’s millionaire businessman husband, Feroze Gulzar, trashed the report calling it “reprehensible”. Then there was talk that the news was the handiwork of the Inter-Services Intelligence, the spy agency of the Pakistan armed forces. The conspiracy theory, spawned by some PPP leaders, claimed that ISI was trying to exact its pound of flesh from Khar for her role in facilitating a United Nations investigation into the missing people detained by the security forces. The agency promptly denied it.

Cyberspace was inundated with opinion and speculation. The news drew comments from readers far and wide that ranged from disbelief to nonchalance to even support for the relationship. While some believed it was yellow journalism at its worst and that the story was nothing more than a figment of the reporter’s imagination, others alleged it was a frame-up to show Khar in bad light. On reader, who mistakenly thought the writer was an Indian, said the reporter was unnecessarily “poking her nose into other people’s business”.

Do you remember the name of the Bangladeshi tabloid which started it all? It’s Weekly Blitz. One person who can’t stop smiling since the publication of the article is Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, the 46-year-old editor of Weekly Blitz. “We journalists are happiest when people read our stories,” says he. Choudhury these days is busy counting the hits on his website, which have shot up from 150,000 a day to 1.5 million in the space of 15 days, with thousands sharing its news on twitter. For a paper with a circulation so low that its print edition is hard to find even in Dhaka, from where it is published, this has been a shot to world — or at least South-Asian — glory.

Choudhury promises to keep the traffic surge going with more explosive revelations. “What we have published is only the tip of the iceberg, there is more to follow,” says Choudhury over the phone from Dhaka. “We didn’t want to put out all the evidences in one go, we have audio and video evidence to stand our ground.” This “solid evidence”, Choudhury says, will be shared with the paper’s syndicate partners gradually.

The story, for the record, was written by Choudhury under the pseudonym Preeta Memon, and claimed it had got the information from Western intelligence agencies. It carried pictures of Bilawal with an unidentified woman. The editor says the picture was not that of the foreign minister, but the uncaptioned photo left the identity to imagination.

Since then, Weekly Blitz has been playing up every little turn of event. It posted a story on the cold war between son and father at the presidential palace in Islamabad and how the couple’s future (Bilawal and Khar’s) was bleak. It has also carried an extensive piece on Muslim clergies in Bangladesh demanding the stoning of Khar and Bhutto. Another article painstakingly tried to draw a parallel between the secret rendezvous of Khar and Bhutto and those of Jawahar Lal Nehru and Lady Edwina Mountbatten in India.

* * *

Choudhury, who has a postgraduate degree in journalism from the University of London, headed the Bangladesh bureau of Russian news agency ITAR-TASS. In 2003, the agency decided to downsize. That is when Choudhury started Weekly Blitz. The tabloid, says Choudhury, was started as an anti-Jihadist platform and to document the rise of militancy in Bangladesh. Its provocative articles have condemned the use of Sharia law and the rise of militancy in madrassas in Bangladesh, raising many eyebrows among the powers that be in that country. In June 2010, it published an article alleging that the Iranian government, by supporting the Sharia law, was sending children as young as nine into prostitution.

However, this time round, the paper is strangely silent on the calls for a fatwa or the stoning of Khar and Bhutto by hardline clerics in Bangladesh. Choudhury says it is the first time that extremist clerics, known for their support for Pakistan, have spoken up against the government in Pakistan. In other words, he has caused a breach between hardliners in the two countries. But the paper’s stand on events following the newsbreak is unclear.

Choudhury insists the article was not aimed at gaining popularity but was part of the tabloid’s larger commitment to people, which is to lay bare the secrets and hypocrisy of people in Islamic republics. For Choudhury, who claims to be a devout Muslim and likes to call his paper an anti-jihadist tabloid with liberal leanings, the story needed to be told to “help people in the Muslim world understand what goes on behind the scenes in Islamic republics”. He refutes the claim that it was a revelation stage-managed by ISI. “ISI is not my source, although I can’t tell you who it is,” he says. “If ISI wanted to spread this information, it would not have knocked on my door; it would have given it to numerous other newspapers in Bangladesh that promote its views.”

Choudhury, who speaks slowly with a drawl, says his article is based on facts and that’s why it has not been refuted till now. So far, he says, he has not been contacted by anyone from Pakistan or elsewhere to establish the veracity of the claims, although his story has been widely carried by newspapers in Pakistan. Foreign minister Khar, who was attending the general assembly of the United Nations in the US when the news broke, has not spoken about the allegations; her silence has only added to the speculation.

* * *

While Weekly Blitz may be playing up the scoop, which has all the makings of high drama, it is still struggling to make money. Though it broke even three years back, Choudhury says advertisements are few and far between. “We have a print circulation of 12,000, and it’s not modest considering that Daily Star, the country’s largest English newspaper, has a subscription of not more than 35,000.” The money comes from paid subscribers for the online edition spread the world over, mostly in the West, Choudhury says. In Bangladesh, Choudhury says, until last week, Weekly Blitz was read only by its detractors to keep a tab on it.

In Dhaka’s journalist circles, Choudhury is considered an adventurous man who likes to print stories that create a sensation. “His recent story has become very big by now; a typical Shoaib story,” says Fazal Kamal, joint editor and managing editor of Independent newspaper in Bangladesh. He is known in some circles but is hardly popular, says Kamal. Some like Jahangir Bin Alam, secretary of the India-Bangladesh Chamber of Commerce & Industry, heard of Blitz only a few years back when Choudhury was arrested on the charge of being an Israeli spy, but says he has never come across it at any newspaper stand.

However, for all the fame Weekly Blitz has garnered in recent days, its editor is a marked man. Charges of treason, sedition and blasphemy have been levelled against him in Bangladesh. In November 2003, just months after his publication launched, he was arrested. While Choudhury was released on bail a year later and the charge of sedition dropped, others continue to hold. Choudhury says the charges were brought up against him during the Khaleda Zia regime which was known for its hard-line approach. “The present government is a secular one, but it is not dropping the charges because it is cautious about losing the Muslim vote bank.” In 2006, his office was bombed by Islamic militants.

Choudhury says he has been targeted because of his views on Israel and his campaigns to promote inter-faith harmony. Choudhury calls himself a friend of Israel and has been ardently advocating diplomatic relations between Dhaka and Tel Aviv, a view that doesn’t have many takers in his country.

The Khar-Bhutto story has brought the spotlight back on Weekly Blitz. The clicks and twitter shares may not change the fortunes of the tabloid in any significant way, but Choudhury insists “it is important to speak up”.