Early years In 1984, he was detained for one month under "preventive detention" by the military regime of
General Zia-ul-Haq, without being formally charged with any crime. The detention was widely believed to be linked to the publication of
From Jinnah to Zia, a book released by
Vanguard Books and authored by former Chief Justice of Pakistan,
Mohammad Munir. In the book, Justice Munir reflected critically on his own role in validating Pakistan's first martial law in 1958, a precedent that many viewed as enabling General Zia's imposition of martial law in 1977. According to Sethi, he first conceived of the idea for an independent Pakistani newspaper out of frustration: while briefly imprisoned in 1984 on trumped-up copyright charges, no newspapers had protested his arrest. The following year, he and
Mohsin applied for a publishing licence under Mohsin's name, since Sethi was "too notorious an offender" to be use the application, Mohsin told him that she intended to publish "a social chit chat thing, you know, with lots of pictures of parties and weddings". It was finally approved in 1987, but Mohsin requested a one-year delay to avoid the first issue coming out during the dictatorship of
General Zia ul Haq.
The Friday Times' first issue appeared in May 1989.
1999 arrest In early 1999, Sethi gave an interview to a team for the
BBC television show
Correspondent, which was planning to report on corruption in the
Nawaz Sharif government. At the beginning of May, he was warned by contacts that his co-operation with the team was being interpreted by the Nawaz Sharif government as an attempt to destabilize it and that officials were planning Sethi's arrest. According to Sethi's wife Mohsin, at least eight armed officers broke into the house, assaulting the family's security guards; when asked to produce a warrant, one of them threatened simply to shoot Sethi on the spot. Mohsin was tied up and left locked in another room. The US-based
Committee to Protect Journalists also sent a protest letter to
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, noting the organisation's dismay "that the state continues its persecution of independent journalists", On 19 May 1999, however—during Sethi's one-month incommunicado detention—Durrani called a
press conference to denounce him as having stolen all of her earnings from the book, stating that his actions were "an even bigger case of hypocrisy than my experience with the feudal system". Durrani sued Sethi for mental torture, and he countersued for defamation. An earlier dispute over the foreign rights had been settled out of court in 1992. A review of the contracts by the UK newspaper
The Independent described Sethi as acting in good faith and described him and Mohsin as "the injured party". == Political career ==