In a cosy Persian restaurant in an Islamabad strip mall, a young man approached Asad Ali Toor for a selfie. ‘I watch your show, I admire your work, thank you for what you do,’ he told the journalist.

Toor’s real crime is speaking truth to power

Days later, Toor was in jail, charged with ‘cyber crimes’ after being interrogated by Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency (FIA). During two separate days of questioning, he was held incommunicado, after his lawyers were pushed away from the door as he was bustled, handcuffed, into the FIA’s building.

After being kept overnight on Monday, he was arrested for using his vast social media presence to ‘spread panic, fear and insecurity’ through the military-backed government and the public.

His objective, according to the FIA charge sheet seen by The Spectator, was to ‘coerce, intimidate and incitement [sic] to violence against the civil servants/government officials and state institutions’.

On Tuesday, a court remanded Toor in custody for five days. On Wednesday, he began a hunger strike. His lawyer, Imaan Mazari, said Toor is being deprived of sleep; she is seeking his transfer to hospital as his health deteriorates.

The FIA failed to respond to multiple requests for information. The Minister of Information and Broadcasting, Murtaza Solangi, a former journalist, provided a ‘fact sheet’ reiterating the FIA charges, adding that Toor had ‘failed to clear his position over the allegations,’ and ‘further investigation is underway’. Neither commented on the legality of holding Toor without his lawyers present.

Toor’s real crime is speaking truth to power. He is one of Pakistan’s few independent journalists, a rare dissenting voice in a rowdy, crowded media pack that functions within tight parameters of censorship and fear. For many people who work in media, Toor is a lesson, an example of what can happen if they transgress the largely unwritten rules that allow them to keep their jobs – and their lives.

Journalists in Pakistan can be killed if they break those rules. The Committee to Protect Journalists says it’s one of the deadliest countries in the world to work in media, with 97 killings since 1992. Most of these cases are unsolved.

Toor knows he is lucky to be alive: in May, 2021, he was beaten up, tortured and had a gun held to his head by men who identified themselves as agents of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, which continues to harass him.

Toor’s high-flying career as a producer of politics programmes for mainstream television ended when his coverage cut too close for the country’s thin-skinned politicians and their military backers, and the pressure became too much for his employers.

He migrated to YouTube, where his show, Asad Toor Uncensored, has more than 160,000 subscribers who tune in for his reporting and commentary on the shenanigans of Pakistan’s ruling classes.

On Twitter (X), he has almost 300,000 followers. He is recognised wherever he goes and though he has detractors, some of whom accuse him of playing fast and loose, he is widely admired and respected for his courage and tenacity.

He lives in Islamabad with his mother (who moved in after the ISI assault), along with half a dozen noisy parrots, and a marmalade tom cat called Mr Garfield. During a recent conversation I had with him at his home, Toor described Pakistan’s journalists as suffering from Stockholm syndrome, so cowed by state repression that even if ‘one fine morning, there is a miracle and they say there is free media,’ nothing would change.

‘Nobody can even speak about the repression here openly, who are the forces who are censoring Pakistani media, silencing Pakistani journalists, attacking Pakistani journalists,’ Toor said. ‘The state of independence of Pakistani media is so low that you cannot report against some big business tycoons because of their investments in media.’ So profound is the repression that journalists don’t even pitch stories, let alone report them, he said.

Toor calls it ‘complete self-censorship’ that starts with an education system than does not teach students to think or write critically. ‘They are sent from universities with a censored mind. How can they – when they come into the field and see the environment of fear – become independent?’

Since his own brutal attack, he said, the situation has become even worse. The state deploys the law against journalists, keeping them tied up in courts, often in cities far from home, preventing them from working. Others are abducted and tortured, he said. Television journalist Arshad Sharif was shot and killed in Kenya in 2022, after leaving Pakistan to escape sedition charges.

Toor’s most recent troubles coincide with the political chaos following the 2022 parliamentary vote of no-confidence that removed Imran Khan as prime minister and led to contested elections on February 8th, tainted by allegations of rigging.

Many journalists in Pakistan agree that media restrictions tightened under Khan, who was prime minister for four years and would likely have won again last month had he not been jailed on corruption charges and his party, Tehreek-i-Insaaf (PTI), dismantled.

While Toor was critical of Khan’s brand of repression, he has also criticised the collusion of the military and judiciary to ensure PTI could not contest the elections. Notably, Toor slammed a decision by the Supreme Court to uphold an Electoral Commission ban on PTI members standing as independents using the cricket bat symbol on their ballot paper to signal to illiterate voters their allegiance to Khan. (Toor’s initial summons to the FIA alleged he’d defamed the judges who made that decision.)

‘I was a critic of the PTI government, at that time aligned with the military establishment, so PTI supporters used to hate me. But after I started talking about their constitutional rights, and I started saying that the military establishment’s crackdown on their party is illegal,’ they understood his reporting was even-handed, he said.

But what if, heaven forbid, his refusal to compromise brings a terrible consequence? ‘I am 40 years old,’ he said. ‘If anything happens to me, I can honestly say I have lived my life the way I wanted.’