Photocopies of cheques and receipts indicate that Sethi paid Durrani with un-publisher-like promptness. The Independent has seen all the documents in the case of Tehmina Durrani versus Najam Sethi and his wife and company. The unprecedented case comes before the Election Commissioner on 28 July. A ruling party MP has urged that Sethi be declared a non-Muslim and banned from voting in elections because of "treachery". His journalists have been detained and threatened, one of them with death three of them have quit in fear. Every day for weeks his home phone line was physically cut - every day he had it repaired, the same night it was cut again. More than 50 demands for income tax, reviving long-agreed settlements, have landed on his desk. He is now being buried alive under a blizzard of actions, legal and extra- legal. The charge of sedition on which he had ostensibly been held was dropped. I flatly deny being used by the government in this matter. "I told them, whoever wants to stop being my friend should go. "All my liberal friends told me not to do it, that I would look bad, my image is bad, that people would feel I'm being used by the government," she told The Independent at her home in a Lahore suburb. She is now suing Sethi for damages, claiming pounds 128,125 for mental torture (Sethi is countersuing her for defamation, claiming pounds 875,000). This was the moment their former friend chose to denounce Sethi. Mr Sethi's behaviour was "an even bigger case of hypocrisy than my experience with the feudal system." "Mr Sethi continued to take all the earnings from my life story while I brought up five children without any financial support from their father," she went on.
His "blatant injustice" caused her "mental torture", she said. The man had stolen her royalties, she said he had insisted that the book was his he had thrown away pages of the original contract and forged new ones in order to cheat her on foreign rights. There followed a long, rambling denunciation by Durrani of her former friend and publisher, Najam Sethi a long list of crimes. Even the cameras of PTV, the state-controlled television network, were present. The scene: Tehmina Durrani had called a press conference. The book was an instant sensation in Pakistan.Ī happy ending? Fast-forward eight years, to in Lahore. I am indebted to them all." They included Sethi and Mohsin. I cannot take the responsibility of naming them. It was a happy, fruitful collaboration in a coded acknowledgment in the first edition, Durrani thanked "four people without whom could not have seen the light of print. As a legal precaution, the publisher's name appeared nowhere in the book, and in the contract Jugnu Mohsin was named as publisher (Sethi says that all three of them felt that Mustafa Khar would hesitate to take two women to court).ĭurrani vested all foreign rights with Sethi and Mohsin, in exchange for a 50 per cent royalty on foreign sales. Amid much trepidation and fear of lawsuits or worse, the book came out in Pakistan in June 1991. With her politically explosive story to tell, Tehmina Durrani was in need of a publisher with guts, and a mutual friend introduced her to Sethi.