Recently a video showing some of Tahirul Qadri’s supporters hankering over a piece of tissue used by their leader went viral. To some, the video proves the ‘cultish mind-set and make-up’ of Qadri’s organisation/party and of its followers; while others have exhibited revulsion at what they feel is Qadri’s allusions to being some kind of a deific character.

TuQ’s fans squabble over a tissue used by their leader.

It is true that this kind of personality veneration is quite common in religious (and other) cults around the world, but it is also true that in South Asian countries like India and Pakistan, exhibiting certain extreme forms of adoration for living religious leaders is not that far away from actually being part of mainstream (non-cultish) traditions.

Much research has taken place (especially in the West) to understand what social, psychological and emotional factors can lead ‘perfectly normal’ men and women to fanatically subordinate themselves to fantastical and ‘irrational’ projections of certain charismatic personalities.

But, if we simply focus on the act of men and women squabbling over a worthless object of everyday life used by such a personality, then one can suggest that concerns from certain quarters in a society usually emerge if that personality is posing to be a religious leader.

Because no such concern is exhibited as such when, say, rock bands frequently throw drum-sticks and sometimes guitars into the crowd and the fans fight it out to grab the piece of wood used by their favourite musicians.

Fans try to grab the guitar (and other stuff) of Kurt Cobain – the charismatic leader of famous grunge-rock group Nirvana – in 1991. Cobain committed suicide in 1994.

Technically both acts emit from similar concepts of extreme personality veneration, but it is the ones associated with the followers of religious leaders and figures that become controversial.

Sociologists who study cult behaviour suggest that this is so because religious cults based on extreme venerations of personalities are more likely, than, say, rock fans, to cross over into committing certain more violent acts of veneration.

Also, such outfits, if they begin to grow into becoming successful economic and political enterprises, begin to be seen as threats by their more mainstream faith-based contemporaries.

Western devotees of infamous religious cult leader, Rajneesh, carrying their leader’s portraits. The large cult was often plagued by accusations of fraud and child abuse. Rajneesh was deported from the US and died in 1990.

The act of lovingly holding on to an object used by ones favourite personality can also simply be a harmless little act of holding on to a certain moment, and then a memory.

There are also those with a hobby of collecting things associated with famous/infamous personalities. Many of these collectors turn this into a lucrative enterprise as well by making hefty profits by putting up the objects for auction.

Whereas both the more puritanical sections of the Pakistani society, as well as the more secular and rational ones have displayed dismay at what they saw in that Qadri video (for different reasons, of course), it would be interesting to also take a look at what remains to be perhaps the most famous incident of adoration for a Pakistani political leader.

In 1966, when the then 37-year-old Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was eased out by Ayub Khan from the cabinet – for disagreeing with Ayub over the latter’s ceasefire agreement with India during the 1965 Pak-India war – he suddenly saw himself being hailed as a hero of sorts by various left-wing student and labour groups.

As word-of-mouth news about how ‘gallantly Bhutto had stood up to his dictatorial boss’ spread and he began to cultivate an image of being a ‘friend of the common people,’; he was advised by some of his close colleagues to form his own party.

Bhutto (left of Ayub Khan who is in the centre) looking clearly distraught at the ceremony marking the ceasefire.

Dr. Mubashir Hasan (a socialist ideologue and one of the founding members of Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party), in his book ‘Mirage of Power’ writes that throughout Bhutto’s political career (after 1966) he (Bhutto) was a curious and contradictory mixture of firm self-belief and self-doubt.

So, to test whether his sudden fame was not just a fleeting moment, Bhutto decided to test the waters by making a train journey that was to end in Lahore.

To his surprise (a pleasant one that is), at almost every station that the train stopped, he was greeted by hundreds of excited young men and women (mostly college and university students) and common working class folk.

The crowds only seemed to grow as the train neared its final destination. In fact, when the train was about 10 miles away from the large Lahore Railway Station, Bhutto and those accompanying him began to notice thousands of people lined up along the route, chanting pro-Bhutto slogans.

When the train finally reached the Lahore station (on the night of 20 June, 1966), Bhutto peaked out and was overwhelmed to see the platform packed with all kinds of Pakistanis in the thousands!

Overwhelmed by the sight, Bhutto slowly walked towards the door of his cabin. Expected to make one of his fiery, populist speeches that he had begun to develop after his departure from the Ayub regime, Bhutto simply cut a nervous smile and then sat on the wooden stairs attached to the cabin door.

The people kept chanting loud slogans, but Bhutto cupped his face with his hands. A friend of his standing behind him tapped him on the back. Bhutto slowly turned around, his eyes now heavy with tears. The friend handed him a white handkerchief with which Bhutto wiped off his tears.

The crowd now was pushing hard towards the cabin. Bhutto just sat there, smiling, shedding tears, almost paralysed by the unprecedented commotion. Hands began to touch him, his friends tried to pull him back inside the cabin, and in all the joyous chaos, one hand managed to grab the handkerchief he was holding.

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The next day some Urdu newspapers carried news of how a peasant from a small village in the Punjab had reached Lahore to greet Bhutto and went back home as the proud owner of a handkerchief ‘with Bhutto’s tears on it.’

Bhutto’s fame continued to grow and in 1967, along with some prominent left-wing ideologues, he finally formed his own party.

In late 1967, it was reported that the villager who had managed to a get hold of Bhutto’s handkerchief was tracked down by a small trader from Lahore and persuaded to sell the piece of cloth to the trader.

The villager sold the handkerchief to the trader for Rs. 500 (a big sum at the time for a poor peasant).

In his book, ‘The Pakistan Peoples Party: Rise to Power,’ researcher and author Phillip Jones suggests that it was about at this point during Bhutto’s early rise that he began to be seen (among the poor of Sindh and the Punjab) as a living saint!

One of the earliest posters of Bhutto and the PPP (1968).

It was some time in 1969 that the popular and upbeat Punjabi folk song dedicated to the Sufi saint, Lal Shahbaz Qalndar, (‘Laal Meri Pat’), began to be played and sung at Bhutto’s rallies. Soon it was altered a bit and Bhutto’s name was added to the song:

Dama Dam Mast Qalandar,
Bhutto da phela number...

(Immediate translation: ‘Dance my intoxicated saint, Bhutto is number one …!).

In Sindh, his name was inserted in a popular Sindhi folk song, ‘Hey jamalo’.

The idea was to project Bhutto as a living incarnation and/or modern political embodiment of rebellious and unhinged Sufi saints such as Lal Shabaz Qalandar.

A refined, articulate, canny and well-read graduate of Berkley University in the US and Oxford University in the UK, Bhutto came from an aristocratic family in Sindh. But after the rupture that saw him suddenly rise as a populist modern folk hero and leftist politician, Bhutto began to hone and cultivate a public image, that of an iconoclast.

For example, he became the first politician in Pakistan who (during rallies) discarded the traditional shervanee along with the western suit and instead began to appear in a simple shalwar-kameez which, in those days, was squarely associated with the fashion aesthetics of the working and peasant classes.

The cultivated, cultured and well-read grandee: With PPP ideologues at the party’s first convention in 1967.

As Bhutto’s party swept the 1970 election in West Pakistan’s largest provinces (Punjab and Sindh), and as his reputation of being a living saint grew, the handkerchief that was now in possession of a Lahore-based trader was back in news again.

On 20 December 1971, when Bhutto took over as the country’s new head of state and government, the Urdu daily, Nawa-e-Waqt, carried a small news item about how the trader had framed the handkerchief and planned to gift it back to Bhutto.

He didn’t (or couldn't) because the left-wing Urdu weekly, Al-Fatha, reported two years later (in 1973) that the trader had sold off the handkerchief for a sum of Rs. 5000!

The iconoclast: Rallying the crowds in 1973.

The article did not mention to whom the piece of cloth was sold.

However, three years after Bhutto was toppled in a reactionary military coup (June 1977), and one year after he was executed through a sham trial (April 1979), Karachi’s (now defunct) English evening newspaper, The Leader, carried a letter by a man who claimed to be in possession of the handkerchief.

According to the letter-writer, the trader did not sell the handkerchief in 1973 but had gifted it to a passionate Bhutto fan, who used to drive a tonga (horse-cart) on the streets of Lahore.

The writer went on to add that the tonga driver, after facing some serious economic hardships in 1977, sold the handkerchief to the father of the letter-writer (who used to run a general store in Lahore). He did not mention the price at which the handkerchief was sold.

Nothing else was ever heard of the handkerchief after this. But in 1987, when I was at college (in Karachi) and a member of the student-wing of the PPP, a friend and comrade who used to reside in the city’s Lyari area told me that the handkerchief was now with a PPP worker in Lyari.

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I asked the friend (who today resides and works in Oman) to take me to the man that he claimed had the handkerchief. But the man was picked up by the police two days before we were supposed to meet him on charges of ‘disturbing peace’ (which, in those days, usually meant protesting against the Ziaul Haq dictatorship).

Though I could never find out whether the man ever had the handkerchief or not, many believe it is still with the man who wrote that letter in The Leader in 1980.

Also read: Bhutto and I

In another interesting little tale related to all this, saw Dawn’s cartoonist, Fieca, taking me (in January 1998) to the home of a labourer (in Lyari) whose wife claimed to be in possession of a sandal that belonged to Bhutto’s daughter and chairperson of the PPP, Benazir Bhutto!

I saw the (white) sandal. The labourer’s wife claimed that she had nicked it during the wedding celebrations of Benazir (that were held in Lyari in 1987).

Said the wife: ‘I was near the stage on which Bibi (Benazir) and (the groom) Asif Ali Zardari were sitting (on a sofa). Underneath the sofa were six or seven pairs of sandals and shoes that Bibi had tried but had not worn. When Bibi began to meet the people, I jumped on the stage, embraced her and on my way back, picked up a sandal. It is my greatest possession.’

BB waves to the crowd from the stage at her wedding celebrations held in Karachi’s Lyari area (1987).

Ten years later, in 2008 a few months after Benazir was tragically assassinated (December 2007), I asked Fieca whether the woman with BB’s sandal was still around. He told me that the last he saw her was in 2001.

So, I went looking for her myself. But the house that the labourer lived in was now occupied by someone else. A man there told me that the labourer had first moved to the Lea Market and then some other area.

‘You wouldn’t happen to know anything about BB’s sandal, would you?,’ I asked. He didn’t, and that was that.