The secular dreamer: AWP president Fanoos Gujjar laid to rest

Political leaders of various parties of K-P and other provinces attend funeral

PESHAWAR: A guiding light of Pakistan’s political left, Fanoos Gujjar, has passed away after a prolonged illness. He was laid to rest in his native town of Riyal in Buner district on Sunday.

The 63-year-old Gujjar had been suffering from multiple diseases for a number of years and had been left with just one kidney for the past decade. However, he suffered a cardiac arrest while at home on Saturday which proved fatal.

He leaves behind three wives but no children.



Political leaders of various parties in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) and other provinces attended his funeral.

Last keeper of the left

Gujjar was the founding chairman and president of the socialist political party, the Awami Workers Party.

He spent most of his life as a progressive political worker struggling for socialistic politics and is considered to be one of the most committed revolutionaries of the left in Pakistan’s history.

Gujjar spent decades in grass root struggles for the rights of peasants, workers, women, students and minorities.

He was among the few political leaders who always worked for the lower classes of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and dreamed to make Pakistan a secular state where all classes lived in peace and harmony.

Early life

Gujjar was born in the house of Haji Zafar Khan in 1958 in the Chagharzai union council of Buner. He received his early education in the district and graduation from the Buner Government College.

He got an introduction to politics during his student life when he joined the Pukhtun Student Federation — the student wing of the Awami National Party (ANP).

By 1984-85, he rose to become the right hand of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan — popularly known as Bacha Khan. He later served his son Wali Khan.

He was also the contributor to the Peshawar based leftist newspaper Daily Shehbaz and was appointed as the editor of the Jiddat newspaper at its Peshawar office.



He distanced himself from the ANP after he was not awarded a national assembly ticket in 1988. He chose to contest the elections on NA-28 as an independent candidate. Bereft of the party’s support, he got 17,000 votes and stood second after the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) candidate Haji Fazal Razziq, beaten by a mere 200 hundred votes.

He embarked on his own political sojourn across the country in the 1990s and brought together people from the downtrodden lower classes together under the banner of “Pakistan Awami Party”.

His struggled reached its peak when five leftist parties gathered under the platform of “Awami worker Party” in 2001 and set the base for what proved to be his last left-leaning project.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 3^rd, 2018.