In the death of Ajmal Khattak we lost a man who was quintessentially an idealist, all his working life chasing a dream to obtain conditions of economic and social justice for the ordinary people. But material success was perhaps never his lot.
What to talk of him enabling others to climb out of deep poverty, such was his stark failure that he died in the same partly furnished three-room house in his village that he lived in almost all his life - though twice he headed the Pushtun's most popular political party, Awami National Party (ANP), and twice he was elected to the national parliament, once as a member of the National Assembly and then as a Senator.
And as he worked in the parliament and his powerful speeches echoed through the galleries and corridors, the hollowness of his political clout was evident by the fact that his own post-graduate son was jobless.
That was perhaps the time when Speaker of the National Assembly and present Prime Minister, Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani, accommodated some three hundred applicants from his constituency. His other contemporaries have had no less impressive record in doing such good to their own friends and families. Ajmal Khattak, it appears in hindsight, was a stranger to the place called Pakistani politics.
His long political career - he joined the 'Quit India' movement at the age of 15 - was more a reflection of the lives and struggles of stalwarts such as Gandhi and Bacha Khan, than the ones he happened to work with later on. He failed as a politician, mainly because he never wanted to be a 'successful' politician. He was a free spirit and lived that way, posing a paradox that while every boy would like to be like him, but no politician would like to follow his politics.
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