"The lights were off all over Lahore [but] the full moon shone in all its glory. Free from the dwarfing influence of the neon lights and electric bulbs, it looked beautiful. But we shut the window, lit a candle and one of us tried to read an old newspaper, which carried the story we were looking for," remembers Anwar Iqbal, a journalist reminiscing about what it was like working in the media when the most vicious of Pakistan’s four military dictators, General Ziaul Haq, ran roughshod over Pakistan starting in the late 1970s and through most of the 80s.

With his uniformed shadow looming large over a terrified Pakistan, and the press in chains, in media chronicler Zamir Niazi’s words, the more adventurous journalists secretly met in hidden, half-lit rooms but out of fear, not shame. Such meetings were illegal and those caught almost always lost their jobs. Others were jailed. So, most met in secluded places late at night because even the goons of dictators need to sleep.

This was one such meeting. It was May 13, 1978. The scents of jasmine and the Queen of the Night wafted through even the closed door. But even their fragrance couldn’t force the journalists to risk open the window. Zia’s minions could be anywhere.

That huddle of journalists, Iqbal among them, was worried about four of their colleagues flogged by Zia’s goons earlier that day. A summary tribunal had ordered Nasir Zaidi, Khawar Naeem, Iqbal Jafri, and Masoodullah Khan lashed for refusing to toe the censors and protesting curbs. Three of them were flogged within 70 minutes after the judgment and sent to prison to complete their terms.

Khan was spared after the prison doctor declared him unfit for flogging on health grounds. The whipping was in reprisal for a countrywide agitation by the journalists against the regime’s coercive media policy. Within a year after taking over, the martial law government had closed down 11 newspapers and fined 13 others.

The secret meeting was especially worried about Zaidi, who has received 15 lashes and was now hand-cuffed to a hospital bed with two rifle-toting police constables flanking him. "Zaidi was and still is quiet and shy. He also suffers from asthma. We never saw him arguing with anyone. Although we were convinced that all four were innocent, we never understood how anyone could flog Zaidi. He was so friendly and polite that everybody loved him. Even his editors never called him by his first name. He was always addressed as Zaidi Sahib. His flogging was a shock for the entire media community. I saw several of his friends crying," remembers Iqbal.

Zia’s dictatorship controlled the electronic media because back then there were no private TV channels or radio stations and both the singular TV and radio entities were government managed. Soon after taking over, he brought the print media also under direct regime control through coercive Martial Law Regulations that excessively curbed freedom of expression. Before they went to print, editors every night had to take newspaper copies to the Press Information Department where a bureaucrat -- and sometimes a military officer, usually a major -- would read the entire paper and ripped out anything they did not like.

The orders were officially stipulated to the editors: Nothing could be published against any regime policy, act, or functionary. Newspapers required prior authorisation to even re-print content, including excerpts from books and even poems. All decisions were arbitrary. The censor’s word was final.

Christophe Jaffrelot who penned, A History of Pakistan and Its Origins, says the victimisation of journalists by Zia formally started with the banning of pro-Bhutto Musawaat daily. This forced Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists to launch a hunger strike in Karachi from December 1, 1977. Within a week, the protest garnered so much support that the government lifted the ban. However, the government quickly resorted to coercive actions against the dissenting journalists re-banning Musawaat in addition to several weeklies, including Al-Fatah and Mayaar that were critical of the martial law regime. After the journalists failed to be subdued, Zia ordered a two-fold repression: violence and infiltration.

In the first crackdown phase several journalists and press workers were arrested and sentenced to rigorous imprisonment terms of up to a year. These included the three who were, in addition, also flogged. In the second phase the regime coerced four journalists to break away from the journalists’ union to create a parallel PFUJ, then known as ‘Rashid Siddiqui Group’, which was patronised by Zia and given full publicity on official media and forced to condemn the real PFUJ’s struggle for press freedom.

The whole repression was meant to coerce the media to convey the overall message of ‘sab acha hai ad nauseum to a restless republic. Journalists learnt to work around the restrictions, though. Sometimes, newspapers just published the sketch of a story allowing the readers to fill in the gaps. "In early 1980s, Murtaza Bhutto’s Al Zulfikar group fired a rocket at Zia’s helicopter near Islamabad. The next day’s newspapers had a story about a rocket fired at an unknown helicopter, urging police and intelligence to be vigilant against terrorists. The censor officers were not aware of the attack, so they allowed it to be published. The next day everybody knew that someone had tried to kill Zia," remembers Iqbal.

Others also rebelled. Nadeem Farooq Paracha recalls, once, after appearing for a few weeks without make-up, as ordered by the regime, some women newscasters on PTV refused to read the then all-important propaganda package of the main 9 o’clock news called Khabarnama, which was read by two newscasters, a woman and a man. For a week, the 9 o’clock news was presented by two men. Embarrassed by the episode, Zia’s Information Ministry advised him to tone down the policy. Zia acceded because rumours were starting to do the rounds, as happens when routine is disturbed under dictatorships.

Then there was Mehtab Rashidi who used to host the popular TV show Aap Ki Baat. By 1983, she was the only woman on PTV appearing without covering her head with the martial law-mandatory dupatta. After she refused to accede to repeated coercion from the ministry to cover her head, she was sacked after she spoke on the show, saying the issue of women’s modesty was for the women to decide and not for finger-wagging male functionaries obsessed by how a woman should dress, and stormed out of the show. She was not to appear on PTV until after strongman Zia fell out of the sky in 1988 and the media breathed a sigh of relief.