Majid Nizami

Majid Nizami was born on April 3, 1928, in Sangla Hill, a small railway town in the Sheikhupura district of Punjab, then part of British India ^[1]. He was the younger brother of Hameed Nizami, a student activist who would soon become one of the most prominent Muslim journalists of the subcontinent. The family belonged to the Arain community of central Punjab, and the age gap between the two brothers meant that Majid grew up in the shadow of a sibling already active in the politics of the Pakistan Movement.

The defining institution of his youth was not a school but a newspaper. In March 1940, the same month the Lahore Resolution was passed, Hameed Nizami founded Nawa-i-Waqt, initially a fortnightly publication that argued the case for a separate Muslim homeland ^[2]. The paper aligned itself with Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the All-India Muslim League at a time when much of the established Urdu press in Punjab was hostile to the League. Majid, a teenager during these years, absorbed both the journalism and the politics of the household.

After the creation of Pakistan in 1947, Majid Nizami completed his education in Lahore, studying at Islamia College and later taking a degree in political science from the University of the Punjab ^[1]. He then traveled to London, where he enrolled for legal studies and simultaneously worked as the Nawa-i-Waqt correspondent in Britain, filing dispatches on Pakistani affairs as seen from the imperial capital ^[3]. The London years gave him a working knowledge of the English press that later shaped his decision to publish an English-language daily of his own.

The turning point of Majid Nizami's life came abruptly. In February 1962, Hameed Nizami died in Lahore, leaving the newspaper he had built without its founding editor ^[2]. Majid, then in his early thirties and still based in London, returned to Pakistan and assumed the editorship of Nawa-i-Waqt. He would hold the position of editor-in-chief for the next 52 years, one of the longest continuous tenures in the history of South Asian journalism ^[1].

His apprenticeship as editor coincided with the military government of Ayub Khan, which had imposed the Press and Publications Ordinance of 1963, a law that gave the state sweeping powers over newspapers. Nawa-i-Waqt under the young Nizami resisted the pressure to become a government mouthpiece, and the paper's circulation grew on the strength of its reputation for editorial independence within an ideologically conservative frame ^[3]. The combination was distinctive: the paper opposed censorship while championing the two-nation theory and a strong defense posture toward India.

Through the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, including the 1965 war, the secession of East Pakistan in 1971, and the government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Nizami kept the paper on a consistent line. He was among the newspaper owners who faced pressure from the Bhutto government through the withholding of state advertising, a standard lever used against unfriendly publications in that era ^[4]. His refusal to trade editorial policy for advertising revenue became part of his public persona and a story he told often in later life.

Under Majid Nizami's stewardship, Nawa-i-Waqt expanded from a single Lahore daily into a national publishing group. Editions were established in Rawalpindi, Karachi, Multan, and other cities, carrying the paper's Urdu readership across Pakistan ^[2]. The group also published Nida-i-Millat, a weekly news magazine, and Phool, a long-running children's magazine that introduced generations of young readers to Urdu prose ^[1].

His most consequential business decision came in 1986, when he launched The Nation, an English-language daily published from Lahore and later Islamabad ^[3]. The paper gave the Nawa-i-Waqt group a voice among the English-reading elite, diplomats, and policymakers who rarely read the Urdu press. The Nation carried the same editorial DNA as its Urdu sibling: nationalist, skeptical of India, supportive of the Kashmiri cause, and insistent on the ideological foundations of Pakistan.

The group entered broadcasting in the 2000s, when Pakistan's airwaves opened to private channels under the government of Pervez Musharraf. Waqt News, the group's Urdu television channel, began transmission in 2007, extending the Nizami editorial line into the fast-growing world of Pakistani cable news ^[4]. By the end of his life, Majid Nizami presided over newspapers, magazines, and a television channel, a portfolio matched by only a handful of Pakistani media families.

Anyone asking who was Majid Nizami beyond the masthead must reckon with his role as an ideological campaigner. He described himself as a soldier of the Pakistan Movement and treated the two-nation theory, the vision of Pakistan as a homeland won in the name of Islam, as a permanent editorial commitment rather than a historical episode ^[5]. His papers marked the anniversaries of the Lahore Resolution and independence with sustained coverage, and his editorials returned again and again to Jinnah, Allama Iqbal, and the unfinished dispute over Kashmir.

In 1992 he became a moving force behind the Nazaria-i-Pakistan Trust, an organization created to preserve and propagate the ideology of Pakistan among younger generations ^[5]. The trust, headquartered in Lahore at a complex named Aiwan-e-Karkunan-e-Tehreek-e-Pakistan, organized lectures, published books, and honored surviving workers of the independence movement. Nizami served as its chairman and devoted much of his later public life to its programs.

His relationship with governments was combative in both directions. He publicly opposed martial law regimes when they curbed the press, and journalists recalled his blunt exchanges with military rulers, including a famous refusal to soften his paper's line when pressed by Pervez Musharraf ^[4]. At the same time, critics noted that his hard line on India and his suspicion of liberal politics placed him closer to the security establishment's worldview than his rhetoric of independence suggested. Both admirers and detractors agreed that he was consistent: the positions Nawa-i-Waqt took in 2014 were recognizably those it had taken in 1962.

The state recognized Majid Nizami's long service to journalism with some of its highest civil honors. He received the Nishan-e-Imtiaz, Pakistan's highest civilian award for distinguished merit, along with earlier decorations for his contributions to the press ^[1]. Professional bodies in Pakistan honored him repeatedly, and colleagues in the All Pakistan Newspapers Society, of which he served as a senior figure, regarded him as an elder of the industry ^[3].

Away from the editorial desk he lived comparatively simply for a man of his position. He married and had one daughter, Rameeza Majid Nizami, who worked within the newspaper group and later took on a leading role in its management ^[2]. His nephew Arif Nizami, son of founder Hameed Nizami, also became a prominent editor, though the two men parted ways professionally in the early 1990s after disagreements within the group, and Arif went on to found a rival paper decades later ^[4].

Among Majid Nizami facts often repeated by his staff was his daily discipline: he continued reading proofs, approving front pages, and writing or dictating editorial guidance well into his eighties. He was a familiar presence at Lahore's literary and political gatherings, usually speaking about the debt owed to the generation that created Pakistan ^[5].

Nizami remained editor-in-chief through the restoration of parliamentary democracy in 2008 and the media expansion that followed, adapting his group to a market crowded with television channels and new competitors. He continued to chair the Nazaria-i-Pakistan Trust and to preside over its functions in Lahore, even as his health declined ^[5].

He died in Lahore on July 26, 2014, at the age of 86, after a period of illness ^[1]. His funeral in Lahore drew politicians, judges, military officers, and journalists from across the professional spectrum, and condolence messages came from the president, the prime minister, and opposition leaders ^[3]. Newspapers across Pakistan, including rivals, published tributes acknowledging the length and consistency of his career.

Leadership of the group passed to the next generation, with his daughter Rameeza Majid Nizami taking charge as managing director and later editor roles within Nawa-i-Waqt and The Nation ^[2].

Any Majid Nizami biography ends with a double ledger. On one side sits an institutional achievement that few editors anywhere can match: he inherited a single Urdu daily in 1962 and left behind a media group with national reach, having guarded its ownership and editorial identity through four military governments and repeated economic pressure ^[3]. Journalists who disagreed with his politics still cited his refusals of official pressure as reference points in Pakistan's long struggle over press freedom ^[4].

On the other side sits his ideological imprint. Among Majid Nizami achievements his supporters count the preservation of the Pakistan Movement's memory through the Nazaria-i-Pakistan Trust and decades of editorial advocacy ^[5]. Critics counter that his papers hardened nationalist orthodoxy and narrowed the space for debate about India, Kashmir, and the country's founding narrative. The argument continues in Pakistani journalism schools and opinion pages, which is itself a measure of his influence.

The institutions he built survive him. Nawa-i-Waqt remains one of Pakistan's oldest continuously published Urdu dailies, The Nation still publishes from Lahore and Islamabad, and the trust he chaired continues its programs in his name. In the history of the Pakistani press, Majid Nizami occupies a place shared with only a few contemporaries: an editor whose personal convictions and whose newspapers were, for over fifty years, effectively the same thing ^[1].