by NADEEM F. PARACHA
Ardeshir Cowasjee PHOTO/Dawn
In 2006, an obituary appeared on the pages of Dawn of someone called A. Cowasjee.
Many well-meaning fans and friends of famous columnist and social activist Ardeshir Cowasjee, rushed to his home, only to find the man up and about, playing with his dogs and inspecting his garden.
Yes, the obituary was of some other Cowasjee. Ardeshir couldn’t help but exhibit his amusement regarding the episode in one of his columns.
He was first bemused by seeing people appear at his gate, look at him as he walked around in his shorts, and then turn away, some without even uttering a single word.
The bemusement turned into a dark comedy when he finally realised what was going on. An old colleague of his told me how he laughed at a bureaucrat who, like many others, appeared at his gate, stood on his toes and silently peeked at Cowasjee.
In the typical style that he spoke Urdu, Cowasjee shouted out: ‘Tum fikar na karo. Hum abhi tak zinda hai!’ (Don’t you worry, I’m still alive). What a character.
Tomorrow the newspapers will be carrying another obituary for an A. Cowasjee. But this time it will be about the Cowasjee so many Pakistanis have come to love, loath or simply get perplexed by.
For almost three decades, Ardeshir Cowasjee remained one of the most read and influential columnists in Pakistan.
Though he wrote for an English language daily, his words reached and echoed in the most significant corners and corridors of power.
Cowasjee came from a well-off Zoroastrian family. Based in Karachi, he was still managing his family business when, in 1972, Prime Minster Zulfikar Ali Bhutto appointed him as the Managing Director of the Pakistan Tourism Development Board (PTDB) – a body formed to accommodate and further attract Western tourists who had begun to come in droves from the late 1960s onwards.
Despite the fact that Cowasjee turned out to be an asset for the board, three years later in 1976, Bhutto suddenly got him arrested. Cowasjee spent days behind bars, where he continued writing letters to Bhutto asking him why he was put in jail. Bhutto never answered, even though he finally ordered his release after 72 days.
Many believe that Cowasjee faced Bhutto’s wrath because he had begun to criticise the Bhutto regime’s growing authoritarianism, in spite of it coming into power through the democratic process.
After Bhutto was toppled by General Ziaul Haq in a military coup in 1977, Cowasjee began writing letters to Dawn’s ‘Letters to the Editor’ section castigating the fallen Bhutto regime.
His well-written and evocatively worded letters became a frequent fixture in Dawn as he then ventured into other topics; topics that gradually began to attract the anger of the Zia dictatorship as well.
In a time when the press was being openly gagged and harassed, Cowasjee was one of the first Pakistanis to invent and articulate a way that has now become a common device used by liberals and secularists to critique political Islam in Pakistan.
After taking Bhutto to task, his letters turned their attention towards the draconian doings of the Ziaul Haq dictatorship and its so-called ‘Islamisation’ project.
Cowasjee did this by simply stating over and over again that the Jinnah (founder of Pakistan) he had met and followed as a young man did not conceptualise Pakistan the way the country’s politicians and military generals were doing.
This argument of his struck a nerve with a number of Dawn readers and soon Cowasjee was invited by the newspaper’s editor, Ahmed Ali Khan, to write a regular column for what was and still is one of Pakistan’s largest English dailies.
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