Clash of the titans: In Sindh, ‘Bhej Pagara’ may emerge as a new trendsetter

Friday’s public rally of the Pir Pagara-led PML-F was its first since Partition.

HYDERABAD:

In Sindh, the decades-old slogan “Bhej Pagara” (Bless us Pagara) was never a threat to “Jeay Bhutto”. Coined in the early 1940s by the Hur Jamaat while fighting against the British, this rallying cry didn’t pose a serious challenge to the populist Bhutto slogan that came to the fore almost 30 years later. But the trend may change now.

Friday’s public meeting of the Pir Pagara-led Pakistan Muslim League-Functional (PML-F), the first ever to have been organised by the party or its parent organisation, Hur Jamaat, since the creation of Pakistan, intimated this in no uncertain terms. Along the National Highway in Hyderabad, a ground spread over 72 acres was packed with people, who remained responsive throughout the speeches which lasted for over five hours.

The crowd had gathered on the invitation of the incumbent Pir Pagara, Syed Sibghatullah Shah Rashdi, who broke the tradition by appealing to his spiritual followers to attend the meeting. Usually Pir Sahab’s followers wait a whole year to get his glimpse at a spiritual appearance held in Pir Jo Goth every Rajab [month of Islamic calendar].

The public gathering gave a thumping boost to the sentiment against the new local government system in Sindh. While the leaders of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) ridicule the comparatively smaller number the Sindhi nationalist leaders draw at their rallies, the PML-F meeting reportedly attracted eight to ten times the number of people what the ruling party was able to gather at its October 15 meeting in Hyderabad.



Also at the Friday’s show were mainstream writers, intellectuals and columnists, who were absent from the PPP’s event. “The trust which the people of Sindh are showing in you [Pir Pagara] is a huge, challenging responsibility,” said columnist and researcher Jami Chandio. After the passage of the new local governance law, the Pir Pagara-led party catapulted to prominence with its “Save Sindh” slogan. For the followers, the slogan is reminiscent of the 1940s struggle led by the namesake grandfather of the current Pir Pagara against the British rule.

“I saw my father, relatives and neighbours passionately fighting against the Farangis [Englishmen],” says an elderly Muhammad Hashim from Nagarparkar, who was 11 years old in 1943, when the “Surya Badshah” was hanged. “I see the same spirit coming alive today. The Hurs are poised to wage a struggle to save their motherland.”

The spiritual association of Hurs with Pagaros dates back to the late eighteenth century and has carried on through battles against foreign invaders, occupiers and to a lesser level after Partition. Although the public meeting was attended by leaders of several political parties, including nationalists, along with their supporters and party activists, the Hurs far outnumbered the overall attendance.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 16^th, 2012.