ARE WE BECOMING A NATION OF CUT-THROATS?
Dr. Khan’s Assassination a slur on our National Honour
Khan Abdul Jabbar Khan was the brother of Bacha Khan.
For sheer brutality and wanton lust for blood, no assassination of a public leader in recent times has shaken the people’s conscience so deeply as that of Dr. Khan Sahib, deservedly described as the ”Grand Old Man” of the Indo-Pakistan Sub-continent. The only parallel that comes to mind is that of Mahatma Gandhi who met a similar fate at the hands of one of the very people whom he served so well and so unstintingly.Dr. Khan Sahib was one of the rare political leaders with whom politics was a life-mission, not a career or a steppingstone for self-advancement, and who retained his innate humanity uncramped by the dust and din of politics. He may have had political opponents, but he had no enemies. His sincerity of purpose and his candour, all too transparent, won him the esteem even of his opponents.
Dr. Khan Sahib was, by common consent, the people’s man. He symbolised the hopes and aspirations of the common man. At the good old age when lesser men would have loved to bask in the comparative sunshine of office, Dr. Khan Sahib renounced office in order to be close in sympathies and understanding to the common man whose service had been a burning passion with him, before as well as after partition. It is a sad reflection on our national character that of all the political leaders Dr. Khan Sahib should have been chosen to strike at and that by a common man.
Is it a grim reminder that as a people we are dangerously going adrift of our cultural moorings? That a son of Islam should take an old man unawares, and plunge a dagger into him, is a meanness which should make every Muslim hang his head in shame. It is a poor testimony of our much-vaunted devotion to our ideology of which the cornerstone was to make the life honour and property of one Muslim sacrosanct to another.
Something is getting seriously amiss with the whole lot of our social and moral standards. Freedom, rather than bring a sense of disciplined self-restraint, seems to have opened the floodgates of intellectual anarchy and lawlessness.The responsibility for this sorry state of affairs lies squarely on the shoulders of the small men on whose shoulders the mantle of the country’s leadership happened to fall. The presence in the midst of these men of a man of Dr. Khan Sahib’s stature was like a silver-lining to an otherwise dark horizon. Now that the assassin’s hand has removed him from the scene, the prospect becomes all the more full of gloom.
In addition to the machinery of the law which has been set in motion, a thorough official probe into the whole chain that led to the gruesome murder has been promised and it is to be hoped, nothing will stand in the way of getting at the conspirators behind the scene, if any. The bungling in the official inquiry up to the murder of the late Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan tended to put a premium on this kind of murders. Dr. Khan Sahib’s assassination may, in a way, be traceable to that one big lapse on the part of the authorities. It is reassuring that those men in the highest seat of authority have in right earnest undertaken to dig up the whole truth about this second big tragedy of Pakistan. Unless the culprits, apparent or hidden, are unearthed and brought to book, the life of no political leader or public worker in the country will be safe. Democracy itself will before long deteriorate into mobocracy. Needless to add, the nation wants the real culprit or culprits.
The real remedy for the anti-social virus that is eating into the vitals of our public life, however, lies in another direction – in a thorough reorientation of our outlook and social values. Goondaism in any shape or form should be given no quarter.
Dr. Khan Shaib’s innocent blood which bespattered the Aikman Road (Lahore) is a challenge to all the elements in the country’s body politic that are honest, clean and patriotic to step into the breach and reorientate the whole trend of politics along the lines of selfless service and devotion blazed by this great martyr to the cause of the country and the people. It will not have been shed in vain, if from its ashes should arise quite a host of social workers dedicated to the great ideals for which this truly great humanist lived, suffered, laboured and died.
M.Y. K.
(The Light – May 16, 1958)
