A man called Tareen

Supreme Court rejected Tareen’s appeal against his disqualification, ending his political career

Many among his friends and foes are gleefully writing Jehangir Tareen’s political obituary. They may want to go a bit slow.

On paper, it’s all over for him. This week the Supreme Court rejected Tareen’s appeal against his disqualification, thereby hammering in the last nail in his political career’s coffin. But is it truly the end of the road for the man who in many ways operationalised and weaponised the PTI into the winning war machine that it is today. Some say Imran Khan would not have been the Prime Minister today had he not had Tareen by his side. This may not be an exaggeration.



Tareen is a success story. Like all success stories, his also has twists and turns and ups and downs and highs and lows and shades of gray. But Tareen as a man — in the 65 years that he has been around on this earth — has achieved more than most people dream of achieving. This fact alone explains quite a bit about how his story has shaped up.

Here’s a snapshot: Jehangir Tareen was born on July 4, 1953 in what was then East Pakistan. His father was a police officer and retired as a Deputy Inspector General (DIG). The young Jehangir spent his years in reputable public schools once his family moved back from East Pakistan. He must have been a good student because he made it to the United States to do his Bachelors and Masters degrees. After that he landed a banking job and then at some stage ended up working as a lecturer at Punjab University. So far this is a typical story of a hard- working person hailing from a professional middle / upper middle class family.

From here, the Tareen story moves into higher gear. He rolls up his sleeves and dives into the entrepreneurial arena by purchasing some land in Lodhran and building a farm. Soon he ventures into industry and ends up establishing a sugar mill. Both the businesses grow into wildly successful enterprises. People cite many reasons for this success but one theme is common: Tareen uses ingenuity, innovation and best practices to build systems. Perhaps proximity to power helped too. In the process, he becomes a self-made rich man.

And so he does what most self-made rich men like to do: venture into politics. A stint with the PMLF, some advisory work on agriculture with Shehbaz Sharif (pre-1999), then into parliament on a PMLQ ticket in the Musharraf era (by now he’s one of the highest taxpayers in Pakistan). He is elevated as a minister and begins to develop a political profile as an able and competent doer with an unsullied reputation. However allegations of insider trading stick in one instance and remain a scar on his career.

Post-Musharraf he flirts with the idea of forming his own party along with some like-minded politicians. But ultimately this entire group joins Imran Khan and Tareen embarks on the next voyage of his successful career — a voyage that would catapult him to heights not scaled before and depths he could not have imagined.

Comparisons are naturally made with his contemporaries. People who fall within a similar age bracket in a profession become obvious competitors. Such competitors eye on another’s careers, measure up against one another’s success and failures and vie to outperform each other in whatever they do. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, many young guns of Pakistani politics emerged from the shadows of their youth and into the blinding light of politics. Most had traversed their thirties and were entering the fourth decade of their lives — an age that combines the vitality of youth with the maturity of mid-life. In the early nineties, these were the men born in the 1950s.



Take a look at the year of births: Shehbaz Sharif (September 1951), Ejaz-ul-Haq (May 1952), Imran Khan (November 1952), Jehangir Tareen (July 1953), Chaudhry Nisar (July 1954), Humayun Akhtar (April 1955), Shah Mehmood Qureshi (June 1956). The nineties were defining moments for all these gentlemen in one form or the other.

Shehbaz Sharif was a revelation as a workaholic administrator when he became the Chief Minister of Punjab in 1997. Ejaz-ul-Haq was thrust into the limelight after the death of his father, General Zia-ul-Haq. Imran Khan won the Cricket World Cup in 1992 and the rest is history. Chaudhry Nisar had been in the Zia Shura in the 1980s but became a frontline politician in the Nawaz team in the nineties. Humayun Akhtar also gained prominence after the death of his father, General Akhtar Abdur Rehman, in the air crash that killed Gen Zia, and Shah Mehmood also found political fame in the same period.

All of these men shared a solid educational background (Imran, Nisar and Shah Mehmood from Aitchison College) and solid family backgrounds. Three are sons of army officers (Nisar, Ejaz and Humayun), two of government servants (Imran and Tareen), one of a landlord (Shah Mehmood) and one of an industrialist (Shehbaz).

Most of these men are now at the pinnacle of their careers, and their success matrix weaves quite a pattern. But Tareen stands out as someone who has created wealth not through inheritance but through his smarts and ingenuity, and sculpted a movement into a winning political party through his — you guessed it — smarts and ingenuity.

But he got hit where it hurts most by the institution that wields a very large judicial sword. In many ways, Tareen was decapitated with the same blade he and his boss sharpened to decapitate Nawaz. The blade was dripping with irony.

Did Tareen get a raw deal? If he did so, then so did Nawaz. Was Tareen wronged because of a mere technicality that did not merit such a painful punishment? If so, then the same holds true for Nawaz.

Tareen is a nuts and bolts guy. He’s the details guy. He puts things together, builds something out of them and then fixes them when they don’t work. He’s also a sane and mature voice in a party that seems to be dominated by inexperienced hotheads. But will his voice, his influence and his advice slowly fade away from the corridors of power?

The rules and precedents of politics say Tareen’s time is over. But Tareen’s story and Tareen’s life trajectory says the story is not over. He may not have an official position and he may not have a designation, but he has his faction, he has his money, he has his ideas and he has his competence at a time when his party seems to be lacking it.

That political obituary may need to wait a while.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 30^th, 2018.

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