Obituary: PPP stalwart Sultan Mehmood Qazi dies at 66

The veteran leader was buried in his hometown of Pind Malkan late on Wednesday

RAWALPINDI/ ISLAMABAD: Sultan Mehmood Qazi, a stalwart of the Pakistan Peoples Party and member of its Central Executive Committee (CEC), died of a heart attack at his house in Jhanda Cheechi on Wednesday. He was 66.

Drawn by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s promise to end discrimination, the hotel doorman turned into a political activist.

In his condolence message, former president Asif Ali Zardari said Mehmood was a prominent party leader who served the party with zeal and dedication. “During Ziaul Haq’s dictatorship he was tortured and imprisoned for years, but did not flinch from struggling for democracy,” he added.

Bhutto’s message of equality and equal opportunity for all resonated with Mehmood — who had dwarfism and was barely three-feet tall — as a result of the bias and discrimination he suffered his entire life.

“I have spent my life trying to guess whether people are laughing with me or at me,” Mehmood told The Express Tribune in a 2013 interview. He was born in Pind Malkan on the outskirts of Islamabad, and never married because of his self-admitted insecurity about his height.

During the interview, Mehmood recalled his first meeting with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto at Flashman’s Hotel. His first glimpse of the PPP founder was Bhutto reclined on a sofa in a smoke-filled room, busy in conversation with the central leader of the then-nascent PPP, Khursheed Hassan Mir.

Mehmood’s transformed from self-conscious and oft-ridiculed doorman to feisty party worker.

He was well known as a man who had braved the iron fist of Ziaul Haq’s dictatorial regime in order to organise secret rallies and meetings, riding on the bars of a bicycle to lift the spirits of other party workers who lived under threat of torture and imprisonment.

Much of Mehmood’s own days were spent in chains between the torture cells of Lahore’s looming Lal Qila, where the physical abuse was coupled with mental abuse based on his size.

Interestingly, Mehmood never contested for a seat. His frontline role was always as a motivator, while in the backrooms, he was a negotiator and mediator.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 10^th, 2015.