Begum Saira Bano is expected to add vigour to the electioneering here for two reasons: her choice of the party to contest a provincial assembly seat (PP-149) and her family background. She is the granddaughter of famous wrestler Gama Pehlwan, daughter of Goga Pehlwan and widow of Jhara Pehlwan. And she is contesting the election on the ticket of Allah-o-Akbar Tehreek, of which the Milli Muslim League (MML), an off-shoot of the banned Jamaatud Dawa, is a part.

She is expected to bring not only some gender balance to the party but also push the well-known family of wrestlers towards a new kind of contest.

Explaining her choice of the party, Bano said that initially she believed in the “Pakistan first” slogan of former president Pervez Musharraf and filed papers for the NA-120 constituency in the 2013 elections, to fight against her brother-in-law Nawaz Sharif (she is a cousin of Begum Kulsoom Nawaz). However, Mr Musharraf’s party, the All Pakistan Muslim League, stayed away from the election and the anticipated exciting political fight within the family could not materialise.

“[This time too] I wanted to contest for the same seat, which became NA-125 after fresh delimitation, but my brother-in-law Abid Aslam [a brother of Jhara Pehlwan] wanted to contest from there on a PTI ticket. Then it was announced that Maryam Nawaz, my niece, will contest from the constituency. So, I shifted to a provincial seat to avoid charges of splitting the family vote,” she said.

With the constituency decided, she began looking for a suitable party — ideally one that had good nationalist and religious credentials. The MML was a natural choice, she said. She was confident that as a daughter of Lahore and as member of one of the city’s oldest families she was destined to win the voters’ favour.

For MML, too, Saira Bano was a natural choice. “She applied, she met the criteria for the ticket and she got it,” said Ahmed Nadeem Awan of the MML. She had a good reputation and a strong bond with the electorate. Being a daughter of the city, she deserved it.

“Most importantly, I belong to a tradition that ruled this city for centuries,” she said, referring to her family’s history as wrestlers who enjoyed an integral place in the city’s culture. “I personify that tradition and the respect attached to it.”

Her husband Zubair Aslam — aka Jhara Pehlwan who fought against famous Japanese wrestler Antonio Inoki in 1979 — suffered a heart attack and died on Sept 11, 1991, at the age of 31. His 17-year-old nephew Haroon Abid was later taken to Japan by Inoki, now Mohammad Hussain after converting to Islam. Haroon has been trained in Japan and may soon be fighting as a fourth-generation wrestler in Pakistan.

Published in Dawn, June 30th, 2018