Senior Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) leader Afaq Khan Shahid died of cardiac arrest on Sunday.
He was a lawyer by profession and considered among those who were close to PPP leader Benazir Bhutto.

Former Student leader, political activist, president of MRD in the 80’s and now President of the Mazdoor Kissan Party Fatehyab Ali Khan(76 years) passed away in a local hospital on Sunday.

LUBP condoles the families of Afaq Khan Shahid and Fatehyab Ali Khan.

Afaq Shahid’s life was full of trials and tribulations

By Imtiaz Ali, The News  Karachi

Former federal minister and PPP leader, Afaq Shahid, died of a heart attack in the city on Sunday. He was known for his struggle against despotism and for the rights of his community, according to the relatives and colleagues of the late leader.

Shahid, who was born in Partipur in Dhaka, started his struggle from student politics in 1965 while studying at the Quaid-e-Azam College in Dhaka. He had been arrested on several occasions during his political career, starting with a 13-month term during the regime of Ayub Khan. He did his graduation while being in jail.
He rose to become the general-secretary of the National Students Federation (NSF). He was again arrested in an alleged bombing case six months before the fall of Dhaka. Shahid was released from the jail when the prison was broken into after the creation of Bangladesh.
He stayed back in Bangladesh, becoming in charge of the “Geneva Camp” and continued to struggle for the rights of the Urdu-speaking community there, according to the family members.

He was “forcibly” sent to Pakistan by the Bangladesh government in 1974.

Shahid settled in Orangi Town, which had a heavy concentration of the people who had migrated from the former East Pakistan after the fall of Dhaka. When the camps of the “stranded Pakistanis” were torched in Dhaka in 1977, Afaq Shahid held a protest demonstration outside the mausoleum of the Quaid-e-Azam.
He was arrested on charges of torching the Pakistani flag by the martial law regime of Gen. Zia-ul-Haq and was sentenced to suffer 15 lashes, according to his brother, Pervez. He remained incarcerated for nine months.
After his release, Afaq Shahid contested and won the local bodies’ elections and became a councillor in Orangi in 1979. Later, he was also elected MNA as an independent candidate in 1985.
Pervez recalled that his brother had protested over Gen. Zia-ul-Haq’s remarks against the Biharis and staged a hunger strike camp in Liaquatabad which was destroyed by police following ethnic riots in the city in the wake of the famous Bushra Zaidi case.
The following day, the police showed his arrest by claiming that some explosive material had been recovered from his car. His arrest triggered protest in Orangi, which also claimed some lives. Afaq was released from jail after nine months of imprisonment.

Afaq then attended the session of the National Assembly, wearing a black chadar in protest, and delivered a two-hour-long speech for the rights of his community. Afaq Shahid later joined the Pakistan People’s Party and was elected MNA from Orangi in 1988 general elections on its ticket.
He remained associated with the PPP till his death, where he was a member of the Sindh Council as well as of the Karachi Coordination Committee of the party, comprising 14 senior leaders, according to a Karachi division leader of the PPP, Saeed Ghani.
Ghani said that with the death of Afaq Shahid, the party had lost an important leader.
The chief minister’s adviser on political affairs, Rashid Rabbani, also paid tribute to the struggle of Afaq Shahid.
The late PPP leader has left behind a widow and four children.
His funeral prayers will be held in Orangi Town on Monday evening as his son arrives from the UK, according to Sindh PPP information secretary, Waqar Mehdi.
OPP: The Director of the Research and Training Institute of Orangi Pilot Project, Perveen Rehman, told The News that they had been saddened by the sudden death of Afaq Khan Shahid.
She said that when she had joined the OPP, Afaq, who was a councillor from Mominabad, helped them in laying gutter lines in the locality.
She said that Afaq had always been accessible to the community members.
She said they used to hold meetings at his residence in Bismillah Colony for addressing the grievances of the people.

A requiem for Fatehyab

By I.A. Rehman, Daily Dawn

FATEHYAB Ali Khan, Mr Victorious as Nisar Osmani and I often called him, surrendered himself to the final arbiter on Sunday night. He himself might have approved of the time of his departure because apart from the pain in his heart the kind of life he had been restricted to after a complicated surgery on the spinal cord had little to enthuse him. He could no longer be what he wanted everybody to take him for.

Fatehyab Ali Khan came into prominence as a leading member of an intrepid students’ group in Karachi who did their people proud by challenging the Ayub regime at the height of its power and its hatchet men in academia and bureaucracy. All of them were externed from Karachi — perhaps the only students in Pakistan to be so honoured — but they succeeded in having their demands met. This group took up in the sixties where the founders of the Democratic Students Federation in the fifties had left off. All of these students went on to achieve distinction in the world of politics, law and journalism, but regardless of what befell them in subsequent years, Fatehyab Ali Khan and his colleagues will be remembered in history among the finest examples of young Pakistanis who have every now and then tried to extricate their nation from the mire of dictatorship and injustice.

As a political worker, Fatehyab Ali Khan shared his leftist colleagues’ trials in swimming against the current. But he remained firm in his commitment to the cause of the underprivileged with a doggedness that had something to do with his Rajput origins and a Qaimkhani dressing. For quite some time he held the Mazdoor Kisan Party’s fort while its chief Afzal Bangash was away in self-exile though it was not easy to manage a Hashtnagar-based party from the shores of the Arabian Sea. He was more fortunate in finding increased space in the Movement for Restoration of Democracy (1981). Working in a political milieu where the rules of the game were laid down by the same elite for whose demolition he was struggling, Fatehyab Ali Khan could not have escaped the weaknesses middle class workers are prone to. However, he was able to hold his head high by demonstrating total repudiation of authoritarianism.

The wave of optimism generated among the democratic-minded people on Benazir Bhutto’s return from exile in 1986 did not leave Fatehyab unaffected. For a brief period he could be seen in a group of advisers to the young PPP leader but she was determined to choose her own counsel, regardless of what middle-aged radicals or old ‘uncles’ thought of them. As a person, Fatehyab Ali Khan always loved plunging himself in an argument and liked to seize any opportunity to get the better of his tormentors.

In 1981, he was at the MRD leaders’ meeting in Lahore when police arrived to round them up. When after some time I noticed his apparition in the dimly-lit stairs of my flat, the first question naturally was as to how he had managed to escape. “Simple”, he said, “they usually identified me by my glasses, so I took them off, put them in my pocket, and retreated to a corner of the room”.

On another occasion, he came asking for a cap as he thought a cap could be as effective as spectacles in giving his pursuers a slip. Despite the battering that was his lot as a non-conformist he retained a bit of innocence. At heart he remained a young student fighter. The imp in him chuckled with delight when he sued a New York hotel for allowing a rat to share the room with him.

He could not have been unaware of the ability of the rulers of different hues to bend constitution and laws to their convenience, yet as a lawyer (though largely non-practicing) he could not believe that Gen Zia could get away with extensive mauling of the basic law. Armed with a copy of the 1973 Constitution he went round calling on friends to tell them that Zia had no authority to act the way he was doing.

The tragedy of people like Fatehyab Ali Khan is that they have had to sweat in an environment where political performance is judged the way a film’s merit is determined by box-office returns. But it is due to the labours of such workers and many others who fade away unsung (Lal Bakhsh Rind, for instance), that expressions such as democracy and rights of the poor can still be found in Pakistan’s political lexicon.

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