Appointment of Cambridge academic as high commissioner risks backfiring spectacularly as row erupts over Jinnah script and money

Seumas Milne
Thursday February 17, 2000
The Guardian

When Akbar Ahmed was chosen to be Pakistan's high commissioner in London by the country's new military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, after last October's coup, the appointment seemed to be a masterstroke by a regime struggling to avoid international isolation.

Here was an unexpectedly respectable frontman for the generals, a Cambridge academic acclaimed for his success in presenting a liberal face of Islam to the west, who might win understanding for the coup leaders' proclaimed mission to root out corruption in Asia's new nuclear power.

Three months later, the posting risks backfiring in spectacular fashion as Mr Ahmed faces allegations of wrongful use of funds from a feature film he sponsored about Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the country's founder, which stars the actor Christopher Lee in the lead role.

He also finds himself at the centre of a bitter dispute over whether he - or the Indian-born, non-Muslim former Channel 4 commissioning editor Farrukh Dhondy - co-wrote the screenplay. Mr Ahmed, who conceived the film as Pakistan's answer to Richard Attenborough's Gandhi and acted as executive producer, is accused by the film's British-based producer, director and co-writer, Jamil Dehlavi, of unjustifiably paying himself more than £50,000 for the script and diverting £70,000 to an offshore bank account to pay his son and son-in-law for jobs they did not carry out.

Mr Dehlavi, who is also suing the high commissioner over the film's credits and unpaid debts, says Mr Ahmed "did not write a word" of the screenplay, and insists his co-author was Mr Dhondy.

Mr Dhondy has confirmed his role, which he says he was asked to keep secret. He was hired by Mr Ahmed, who asked for some minor amendments to parts of the script which he decided were "not Islamic enough", he says, and was paid £12,000 for his work.

Mr Ahmed rejects the allegations - though he accepts Mr Dhondy was involved in the screenplay - and insists he has earned nothing from his years of involvement in the £3m Jinnah project.

He says he is preparing to go to the fraud squad with counter-claims about Mr Dehlavi's handling of the film's accounts.

The high commissioner says the accusations against him by Mr Dehlavi and Mr Dhondy are part of a campaign by the "Indian lobby" to discredit him and, by extension, the new military regime.

He claims credit for the film's philosophy and says his collaboration in the script was an essential part of the process.

The eruption of controversy around the film, which is expected to be released in Pakistan in the spring but has yet to be sold in the west, follows a series of bitter disputes during shooting, when it was wrongly alleged at one point that Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, was the real scriptwriter.

Jinnah is a revered figure in Pakistan and his portrayal by an actor best known for his role as a Dracula caused outrage in some quarters. The alarmed Pakistani government eventually withdrew £1m from the film.

During its production, Mr Ahmed let it be known that he would take no more than one rupee for his involvement - a claim witnessed by several of those involved in the production. The declaration was in emulation of Jinnah, who took a salary of only one rupee as Pakistan's first president.

Documents seen by the Guardian confirm that Mr Ahmed was paid £51,500 by QPL, the company he set up to oversee the project, as a "writer's fee".

They also show that £35,000 was paid through the film production company to Mr Ahmed's son, Babar, as co-producer, and another £35,000 to his son-in-law, Arsallah Khan Hoti, as associate producer, into a private family bank account in Jersey in the name of his wife, Zeenat Ahmed, who acted as an unpaid company secretary for QPL.

Mr Ahmed - an author of books and a television series on Islam and an Iqbal fellow, sponsored by the Pakistan government, at Selwyn college, Cambridge, until his recent high commission appointment - rejects all accusations of wrongdoing, as does his wife. They say that they have had to sell jewellery and land to keep the film afloat.

The high commissioner says that, although he paid tax on his £51,500 writer's fee, he has ploughed the money back into the film, and his executive producer's fee of £70,000 has been deferred.

He has, he says, taken nothing for his role as head of the project, but like Jinnah, is entitled to his "professional fees". Future profits will, his spokesman now says, go to an "educational trust".

Mr Ahmed rejects the claim that he was not co-writer of the script and says his son and son-in-law were fairly paid for work for the film, notably helping to raise hundreds of thousands of pounds from their family.

Their fees have gone back into the project and will entitle them to a share of any profits. All Pakistani legal regulations have, he says, been followed over the Jersey account.

Mr Dehlavi denies that Mr Ahmed's son or son-in-law played any role in the production. Two other men who worked on the film, production accountant Peter Winstanley and production supervisor Andrew Wood, also insist that neither of the men was to their knowledge involved in any way.