It is August 21, 2020 today and also the first of Moharram. Today the ‘Hasil’ [achievement] of our social and political life became one with the soil. He used to be called ‘Abba’ [father] among his close friends and took pride in it too.

It was the fount of our knowledge, Karachi University (KU), where we first set eyes on Abba, on July 1, 1982. It was the first day of the academic year and for us newcomers to KU, the first day we set foot in KU as well. It was a strange spectacle for us. Right from the Silver Jubilee Gate, that historic primary entrance to the university, there was a hubbub of activity, welcoming newcomers with a warmth and zeal that future entrants will likely never receive. As you reached the post office, the festiveness reached a frenzy. A great part of this was due to the different welcome stalls on the tree-lined walkway, set up by various student organisations to facilitate the freshmen and lure them to join their groups.

Primarily, you could see stalls and welcome banners of two organisations. One was of the Islami Jamiat-i-Tulaba, known colloquially as the Jamiat, which worked under the Jamaat-i-Islami. The other was ‘USM’, i.e. the United Students Movement, which was an alliance of various student groups opposed to the Jamiat. Suddenly, on that day, in the general boisterousness, the sounds of loud political slogans began to be heard, which took on a fierce intensity. What was a festive atmosphere turned into a violent disturbance, ful of chaos and panic. And equally suddenly, the sound of gunshots was heard, which soon turned into a melee of gunfire. In seconds, the landscape had changed and, in the ensuing chaos, we too ran helter-skelter towards the lobby, before the Economics Department.

Somebody said there had been an altercation at the stalls that had ended in the firing. In the lobby, a student named Qadeer Abid, who had been hit, was being carried by another student who was running towards the cars standing near the Administration Block. We had barely reached the Economics Department in our headless run when a group of male students coming from the Journalism Department began to fire towards us. In front of us, someone cried out holding his leg. We discovered he had been hit by a bullet. Someone in a group of seniors running past us shouted, “Oh no! That’s Hasil Baloch!”

Some of us took shelter next to a wall. ‘Who’s Hasil Baloch?’ I asked another boy hiding next to me. He responded, “USM’s president, Hasil Bizenjo.” We stood there sheltering together for a few minutes and saw that some other boys picked up Hasil Bizenjo and took him with them. Hiding next to me, my new friend told me his name was Azhar Abbas and that his elder brother Mazhar Abbas was a friend of Hasil Bizenjo. “Yaar Azhar,” I said to him, “but isn’t Hasil Bizenjo much older than everyone else?”

Senator Mir Hasil Khan Bizenjo, who passed away from cancer on August 20, was a master at the art of political alliances and taking people along with him, while retaining his principles and ethics. A former university comrade remembers him

“These are village folk, that’s why they look older than us city folk,” Azhar tried to reassure me with his logic. But one boy who was passing by us with a USM badge pinned to his chest, laughed and said, “We don’t call him Abba for nothing, boss!”

Later on I would discover that this boy, who I took to be just another USM worker, was also in my class and his name was Rao Kaleem. “Whatever you call him,” I called out to Rao, “your Abba was lucky today to survive, or he’d be dead.”

We found out later that Qadeer Abid had died in the firing. I was sure USM would take revenge. After all, even the head of USM was from a village and what kind of villager would not take revenge! But I was in for a surprise. At our class’s subsequent welcome party, a recovered Hasil addressed us and said, “We ideological people prefer changing society over taking revenge. Taking revenge is a feudal mindset.”

That day, I found a new feeling for Abba in my heart, one of respect. I joined the Democratic Students’ Federation, the student wing of the Communist Party which was also an active member of the USM alliance. Since Abba was the leader of the USM, I got to spend a lot of time with him. His thoughts were always above any sort of party chauvinism, and were purely ideological. He was well read and, on top of that, his soft tone of speaking, affectionate mannerisms and a nature that liked to take everyone along, made him dear to everyone. In the lobby, in the cafeteria, in study circles and even in the hostel, we not only learnt from him about Pakistan’s social and political dialectics but, along with him, also crafted a narrative to address the socioeconomic problems of the time, in line with the Communist Party’s idea of a national democratic revolution.

By 1983, we could feel political tensions rise. Under the Zia dictatorship, democratic norms in educational institutes themselves were under attack and, in that climate of rising fascism, we did not believe elections to the student unions would even take place. But then the Jamiat received a green signal and were even intimated the election dates earlier than everyone else. Their preparations for the elections had already reached a peak in secret, while we barely got a week to prepare.

Suddenly, one day, Abba called and told us that even though we had no money, we had to start the election campaign and had to announce the panel the next day as well. He told us to come to the hostel to make some handmade posters, since neither did we have the money to print posters nor, even if we could raise some, would there be time enough to print them. He told us that it looked like the establishment was heading in the direction of engineered elections, since the kind of resources the Jamiat was fighting with, we would be nothing in front of them.

‘Then why even bother fighting?’ we asked. A typical smile spread across Abba’s face and his eyes twinkled with intelligence, the way they often did. “They will do what they will, but we should at least do whatever we can.”

What happened next is exactly what the entire state machinery had been deployed for. That is, the Jamiat won. But during this process I discovered an amazingly inclusive leader in Abba. How to keep an alliance intact, how to take people along with you, how to put together a collective plan of action, what principles could be used to get the maximum number of people to come together on a minimal agenda to take the democratic process forward, how to find ways for social betterment, and how to maintain respect for the opposition even in an ideological battle — Abba was a master in these things and student politics learnt all this from him.

In a country where even big political alliances often do not last beyond a few weeks, USM remained intact while Abba was active in student politics. This despite the fact that it contained within its folds organisations that were ideologically like fire and ice, and whose parent political, religious or ethnic parties were at daggers drawn on the national, and particularly Karachi’s, landscape.

If one takes a wider view, as a nation, we did not learn much from Abba’s skills. Or even if we did learn, we’ve buried this kind of political training somewhere beneath the petty priorities and compromises of individual political parties.

This is why the anti-Zia Movement for Restoration of Democracy (MRD) still seems like the last political movement of note. Its success was largely because of the inclusion of leaders with the thought process and stature of people like Abba. But after the MRD, Abba probably died a thousand deaths seeing the results of more or less every subsequent political alliance and movement. He knew well that, gradually, politics was being turned into a business in this country. And that unseen powers were taking decisions that had nothing to do with the public interest.

A recent example of this dismay was Abba’s speech after the results of the elections to the Chairman Senate, where he loudly but also almost tearfully declared: “I believe parliament has lost today. Today, in practical terms, it has been proved that superior powers are more powerful than the parliament. Today, powerful factions have won. Parliament would have won today had you made Raza Rabbani the chairman. But now I feel ashamed to sit here.”

But nobody else felt ashamed and his parliamentary helplessness kept eating away at Abba. It was like we had turned our face away from his entire life’s ethical, political and parliamentary struggles and left him alone, like the last man standing in a defeated army. He was a cancer patient and he was fighting that disease too. But although his son and all of his friends were convinced he would not survive this time, we always only saw him jovial. Our Abba was not one to give up. After all, as he himself used to say, “They will do what they will, but at least we should do whatever we can.”

He had no fear. In his last address in parliament, Abba had declared, “We have but one life, either ‘they’ can take it or God can.”

Yesterday, our Abba finally died.

At this very time that I am finishing writing this, I am sure that, in his ancestral land Nal, Abba too would have also turned his face away. Not to ignore his comrades, but as if to say, ‘You will never find another as rare as me.’

This article first appeared in the online Urdu journal Hum Sub

The writer is an advertising professional and playwright

Translated from Urdu by Hasan Zaidi

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 30th, 2020