Lovey Bhai, engineer Saleem Pirzada, National President of Parcham Party of India expired in the night between December 12 and 13, 2017 in Apollo Hospital, Delhi. He was referred to that place from our own Hospital of the JN Medical College at AMU via Sir Ganga Ram Hospital following a massive heart attack that left him in a state of paralysis.
But these are dry and mundane details about the sad demise of a political personality of the level of a statesman. Urdu speakers use very expressive words and couplets for departed people and since not all of the departed souls deserve such high assessment these words are mostly lost in their worth. This time all of the seemed so appropriate.
In this view due leverage should be given to the fact that I felt so impressed by his genuineness that objectivity might slip out of my words but I assure all that I am striving not to allow that.
So here we list some of the Urdu expressions first that have been just used for late engineer Saleem Pirzada.
Hazaron saal nargis apni be noori pe roti hai,
Bari mushkil se hota hai chaman main deedawar paida..
Nargis (flower) cries for a millennium at her lack luster life
After mighty hurdles a connoisseur of beauty is born in garden
Muslim community the world over is easily one and half a billion strong. Yet they are in a state of shambles in the world today. I would count him amongst those rare souls who worked selflessly for whole life with every possible sacrifice barring life. the fete is all the more awesome owing to the fact that success could never have come in his lifetime. It need monumental courage and fortitude, patience and utter and complete lack of selfish motives to make that kind of commitment.
Above Urdu couplet is by Dr Sir Muhammed Iqbal, himself an epitome of the same ideals. This couplet is mostly lost on those for whom it is so often applied. Not in case of Allama Iqbal and not in case of Saleem alias Lovey Pirzada.
Nazar Abbas wrote :
Bade ghaur se sun raha tha zamana
Humein so gaye dastan kehte kehte
The world was listening rather attentively
It was me who slept while narrating the tale
Indeed he was telling a tale that was worth listening. Islam is the tale of real purpose of life as ordained by God. Muslim community is the flag bearer of that mission. This is the faith of Muslims. But Lovey did not pursue that angle. His mission was mission of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan. It is also called Aligarh Movement. in a nut-shell it can be summarized as follows : To empower Muslims of modern education so that they can take their rightful place in the scheme of things Indian.
This is the tale that was left incomplete by his departure from amongst us. The moment you utter the word Muslim you are very likely to be termed communal in a partisan sense in our country today. That this is not the case was the onerous task he had assigned himself, the task of the proportions of cleaning the fables Augean Stables.
Importance of Nehru's sabotage of the Cabinet Mission Plan, a dry bit from the history of the freedom movement of India, became significant to my mind only after those excruciatingly long discussions that I had with him for years. If a person like me takes that much of time then communicating the same to the country as a whole is task that is next to impossible and that brings the tragedy of being Lovey Pirzada into perspective.
If I allow his life to be cast as a tragedy. My intentions are absolutely otherwise. It is exceedingly difficult to adjust with the most inconvenient reality that he took upon himself a problem that could not have been solved in a single life time. So many people will think of it as a foolish choice. Not me. It was a tough, gutsy and extremely courageous choice. I salute the man.
He was not a flawless man. Who amongst us is? I am not the one to indulge in fault finding in a departed soul. let alone a friend and well wisher like Lovey. Indeed I might add that anyone trying to indulge in this activity will not get much benefit but indeed will be depriving himself of enormous felicity. That was the level of his purity of intentions. In Islamic languages we have word for that Ikhlas.
And that is why the pain of his departure is so excessive. that is why it was so difficult to console two students today in his burial - both of these are absolutely firebrand and feisty activists.
Personally I have no aptitude for students politics. I never had in my student days and nor I am satisfied at the present political exercise in students community. This inevitably brings me in a state of considerable difference of opinion with the departed leader but I am not going to allow that to come in my way while making my observations about him.
Fervour of any political inclination has a fire in it. The heat of this fire varies in degrees. The temperature in case of Lovey was extraordinarily high.
That worldly success could not have come his way and that it did not come his way I have already alluded to. I have also told what makes him monumentally important - his taking up the impossible task in the face of almost certain lack of possible success.
This lack of visible success certainly had its due toll on his health and I am sure he was aware of it - a sacrifice is a sacrifice only when you know the upcoming loss. Ultimately it took his life. This should not be interpreted in any morbid sense - in Islam it is glorious and glorious it was. he never couched his sentiments in religious, Islamic, language. His disposition was not at all communal. This is a fact that will need enormous amount of work to delineate for he used the terminology of political interests of Muslims.
He certainly had regrets for Muslims of India not listening to him and not taking up his call. But then why do I say that the world was listening attentively?
Answer to this question is same as to the question regarding whether Muslims are aware of their miserable lot in present India. They are of course aware and completely so.
My personal view is that the lacuna in Lovey Pirzada's plan was not his lack of personal commitment on his part but lack of ideological clarification on part of academia - Muslim or secular.
The ideologues who supplied him ideology did little better than telling him - improve the political lot of Muslims of India. that simply does not help. The proposal has to be viable. No academician supplied him that.
In a milieu where talk of the secular interests of Muslims of India ended up in the partition of the country refinement of the same issue for the Muslims who consciously opted to remain in India at the time of the partition was very tricky issue and it remains so till now. problem did not reside in Lovey Pirzada's efforts but in the tools handed over to him by the academia.
I persistently assured him of the rightness of his mission and choice and tried my level best to convince about my point of view but my consolations did not bring any solace to him. This again should not be taken in any negative sense. He was a committed man and he left this world in that state.
Let us not forget that Javed Habib, another product of AMU Students Union, too left this world with the gigantic burden of destruction of Babri Masjid on his conscience.
But these are dry and mundane details about the sad demise of a political personality of the level of a statesman. Urdu speakers use very expressive words and couplets for departed people and since not all of the departed souls deserve such high assessment these words are mostly lost in their worth. This time all of the seemed so appropriate.
In this view due leverage should be given to the fact that I felt so impressed by his genuineness that objectivity might slip out of my words but I assure all that I am striving not to allow that.
So here we list some of the Urdu expressions first that have been just used for late engineer Saleem Pirzada.
Hazaron saal nargis apni be noori pe roti hai,
Bari mushkil se hota hai chaman main deedawar paida..
Nargis (flower) cries for a millennium at her lack luster life
After mighty hurdles a connoisseur of beauty is born in garden
Muslim community the world over is easily one and half a billion strong. Yet they are in a state of shambles in the world today. I would count him amongst those rare souls who worked selflessly for whole life with every possible sacrifice barring life. the fete is all the more awesome owing to the fact that success could never have come in his lifetime. It need monumental courage and fortitude, patience and utter and complete lack of selfish motives to make that kind of commitment.
Above Urdu couplet is by Dr Sir Muhammed Iqbal, himself an epitome of the same ideals. This couplet is mostly lost on those for whom it is so often applied. Not in case of Allama Iqbal and not in case of Saleem alias Lovey Pirzada.
Nazar Abbas wrote :
Bade ghaur se sun raha tha zamana
Humein so gaye dastan kehte kehte
The world was listening rather attentively
It was me who slept while narrating the tale
Indeed he was telling a tale that was worth listening. Islam is the tale of real purpose of life as ordained by God. Muslim community is the flag bearer of that mission. This is the faith of Muslims. But Lovey did not pursue that angle. His mission was mission of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan. It is also called Aligarh Movement. in a nut-shell it can be summarized as follows : To empower Muslims of modern education so that they can take their rightful place in the scheme of things Indian.
This is the tale that was left incomplete by his departure from amongst us. The moment you utter the word Muslim you are very likely to be termed communal in a partisan sense in our country today. That this is not the case was the onerous task he had assigned himself, the task of the proportions of cleaning the fables Augean Stables.
Importance of Nehru's sabotage of the Cabinet Mission Plan, a dry bit from the history of the freedom movement of India, became significant to my mind only after those excruciatingly long discussions that I had with him for years. If a person like me takes that much of time then communicating the same to the country as a whole is task that is next to impossible and that brings the tragedy of being Lovey Pirzada into perspective.
If I allow his life to be cast as a tragedy. My intentions are absolutely otherwise. It is exceedingly difficult to adjust with the most inconvenient reality that he took upon himself a problem that could not have been solved in a single life time. So many people will think of it as a foolish choice. Not me. It was a tough, gutsy and extremely courageous choice. I salute the man.
He was not a flawless man. Who amongst us is? I am not the one to indulge in fault finding in a departed soul. let alone a friend and well wisher like Lovey. Indeed I might add that anyone trying to indulge in this activity will not get much benefit but indeed will be depriving himself of enormous felicity. That was the level of his purity of intentions. In Islamic languages we have word for that Ikhlas.
And that is why the pain of his departure is so excessive. that is why it was so difficult to console two students today in his burial - both of these are absolutely firebrand and feisty activists.
Personally I have no aptitude for students politics. I never had in my student days and nor I am satisfied at the present political exercise in students community. This inevitably brings me in a state of considerable difference of opinion with the departed leader but I am not going to allow that to come in my way while making my observations about him.
Fervour of any political inclination has a fire in it. The heat of this fire varies in degrees. The temperature in case of Lovey was extraordinarily high.
That worldly success could not have come his way and that it did not come his way I have already alluded to. I have also told what makes him monumentally important - his taking up the impossible task in the face of almost certain lack of possible success.
This lack of visible success certainly had its due toll on his health and I am sure he was aware of it - a sacrifice is a sacrifice only when you know the upcoming loss. Ultimately it took his life. This should not be interpreted in any morbid sense - in Islam it is glorious and glorious it was. he never couched his sentiments in religious, Islamic, language. His disposition was not at all communal. This is a fact that will need enormous amount of work to delineate for he used the terminology of political interests of Muslims.
He certainly had regrets for Muslims of India not listening to him and not taking up his call. But then why do I say that the world was listening attentively?
Answer to this question is same as to the question regarding whether Muslims are aware of their miserable lot in present India. They are of course aware and completely so.
My personal view is that the lacuna in Lovey Pirzada's plan was not his lack of personal commitment on his part but lack of ideological clarification on part of academia - Muslim or secular.
The ideologues who supplied him ideology did little better than telling him - improve the political lot of Muslims of India. that simply does not help. The proposal has to be viable. No academician supplied him that.
In a milieu where talk of the secular interests of Muslims of India ended up in the partition of the country refinement of the same issue for the Muslims who consciously opted to remain in India at the time of the partition was very tricky issue and it remains so till now. problem did not reside in Lovey Pirzada's efforts but in the tools handed over to him by the academia.
I persistently assured him of the rightness of his mission and choice and tried my level best to convince about my point of view but my consolations did not bring any solace to him. This again should not be taken in any negative sense. He was a committed man and he left this world in that state.
Let us not forget that Javed Habib, another product of AMU Students Union, too left this world with the gigantic burden of destruction of Babri Masjid on his conscience.