Mourning a man who mourned for Pakistan
Ardeshir Cowasjee – Dawn.com file photo
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.
In his columns of the mid and late 1980s he continued to bemoan how both Bhutto and Zia had gone about shattering Jinnah’s dream. After Zia’s demise in 1988, Cowasjee became even more pointed against the civilian governments that followed Zia, accusing them of corruption and nepotism.
Also, by the early 1990s, he had slowly been moving away from his old rhetorical style and towards putting on paper hard facts and figures as he went about like a man on a one-way mission putting parties like the PPP, PML-N and the MQM to sword.
Also being a passionate Karachiite with a desire to see his beloved city return to being what it had been before the 1980s, Cowasjee directly confronted the powerful ‘building and land mafia,’ using both his pen and the courts to halt the construction of a number of illegal and gaudy shopping arcades and parking lots – especially on lands that were originally allotted to support parks.
This was also the period when Cowasjee began receiving serious death threats, but he soldiered on.
Though in his columns of the 1980s and 1990s, Cowasjee had always spoken about his understanding of Jinnah being a progressive man, it was from the late 1990s onwards that he openly began to suggest that Jinnah perceived Pakistan to be a progressive, secular Muslim country.
This was Cowasjee reacting to what the second Nawaz Sharif government was planning to do: To introduce a constitutional bill that would have actually endorsed Sharif’s jump from being a prime minster to becoming an ‘Ameerul Momineen.’
So when General Pervez Musharraf overthrew the Nawaz regime in 1999, Cowasjee cynically mocked Sharif almost exactly the way he had done Bhutto, Zia and Benazir. His overall message remained to be that all these leaders were misfits in a Pakistan that Jinnah had conceived.
They were misfits because they were selfish, authoritarian and never far from using religion and other populist gimmicks to retain power.
During his early years, Cowasjee seemed supportive of Musharraf, but all the while advised him not to repeat the mistakes of other Pakistani military dictators like Ayub Khan and Ziaul Haq.
In other words, Cowasjee was warning him to stay away from the usual civilian lot that becomes active only when allowed into the corridors of power through the backdoor. Cowasjee knew better and as the society under Musharraf and after the September 11 episode began to fully reap what was sown in the name of Islam by Zia, Cowasjee started to sound extremely bitter and cynical.
Shrugging at Musharraf’s political misadventures, Cowasjee became more direct and critical against the religious lobbies and parties, so much so that many of them began to accuse him of being anti-Islam.
In 2003, banners went up in Karachi cursing Cowasjee of working against the so-called ‘ideology of Pakistan’ and Islam, and the government had to post police guards outside his home in Karachi’s Bath Island area.
This was also the period when Cowasjee began appearing as guest on privately owned television channels that had exploded onto the scene after 2003.
But on TV Cowasjee was nothing like he was in print. Instead of the articulate columnist with a great command over the English language, Cowasjee decided to almost entirely speak in Urdu.
His Urdu was crude and unsophisticated but ironically perfect to express the more frustrated aspects of his personality that had been building up for decades as he saw his country rapidly slip into a quagmire of authoritarianism, corruption, intolerance and violence.
By now he had also become extremely cynical. First, about this country’s leadership that kept producing one bad apple after another and then about the Pakistani people, whom he began to describe as a lot without any ability to learn from past mistakes or correctly decide what was actually good for them.
So on TV, no matter how hard an anchor would try to make Cowasjee sound like he did in his columns, Cowasjee would refuse and instead continue to use Urdu slang and words like ‘khachar’ (donkey), ‘chariya’ (demented), ‘chor’ (thief), among others, to define politicians, military men and their followers.
For example, during one such TV show when asked what he thought about Pakistan’s status of being a nuclear power, he smirked, pressed mischievously upon his walking stick, and said: ‘Sala iss qaum sey guttur to bundh hota nahi, bum kya chalaye ga …’ (how can this nation be a nuclear power when it doesn’t even know how to stop the flow of an overflowing gutter).
Though he first appeared to be a man whose old age had given him the license to scold the powers that be in the crudest of Urdu, he ultimately became a caricature of himself; or rather was reduced to being one by an electronic media whose own cynicism was not only more amoral but wrapped in all the hypocritical trappings Pakistan’s establishment, polity and society have been quivering in.
Alas, better sense prevailed and Cowasjee’s TV appearances gradually came to a halt. But his columns kept coming and by the time he announced his retirement late last year, he had gone back to once again remind his many readers that this was certainly not the Pakistan Jinnah had dreamt about.
He lamented the fact that Jinnah had passed away too early and that it was left to old men like him to see this dream crumble, piece by piece, right in front of their eyes.
At the time of his death the police guards were still posted outside his house as threats from the building mafia and religious outfits never did stop. But these guards, though provided by the government, were largely financed and fed by Cowasjee.
A Zoroastrian, he always explained himself to be a humanist because to him all religions were basically about humanitarianism.
Cowasjee was also involved in a number of charities, where he liberally donated money for the education of needy students, the construction of parks and a number of other causes.
And though he usually came out as being an angry old man in his columns, in private life he was a warm-hearted family man and someone who always cherished receiving all kinds of people at his home.
In the area where he lived throughout his life in Karachi (Bath Island), his beautiful old bungalow with old shady trees, a neatly manicured garden and low walls is a reminder of what Karachi was once like.
In fact, the street where his house stands is also the only street left in Bath Island that maintains a semblance to what the area was like before it was turned into a congested bundle of ugly apartment buildings and uglier bungalows of the neuvo-riche, who began arriving here after the late 1980s.
As a columnist and more so, as a genuine fan of Jinnah’s, I’m sure Cowasjee passed away heartbroken, unable to actually see Pakistan become what he thought Jinnah wanted it to become. But as a man he lived a full life, leaving behind a huge number of fans and friends to remember him for a very long time.
Nadeem F. Paracha is a cultural critic and senior columnist for Dawn Newspaper and Dawn.com
Mr. Cowasjee was a gentleman, a man with a golden heart. He could have never survived the dirty Pakistani politics and it’s politician. Glad he stayed away from it! Rest in peace!
Your writings will always remain an asset for Pakistan and the rest of the world.
saddening news, one more saner voice lost.
A great and respected man! I wish I could have met him in real life!! My loss!
I really wonder why Mr.Cowasjee did not take part in politics, i guess the honest never had a role to play after partition. He pinned hope on feudals and the army to value democracy, such a shame that true patriots never had a say to run this country. I cannot believe his patience being in Pakistan, apart from the hindu and christians, even the muslims who are fed up of the country over the years migrated. But belonging to an even smaller minority parsi group, he always had a love for the country. Good news for all his opponents, now there will be one less honest soldier in the ranks of Pakistan. What is saddening is i dont read many comments from people other than Karachi, none of the other provinces realise the essence of being a true blue Pakistani and understand the founding father’s vision like he had. I hope we have a library, univerisity or something monumental to acknowledge this colossal loss of Mr.Cowasjee not being among us anymore. the saying “pen is mighy than the sword”" makes sense, and i hope other columisnt pick up from where he has left us.
I read Dawn.com almost every day and come across his column by chance. I never knew him but his columns were eye opener and instantly I became his follower. I was thinking about his safety in a country called Pakistan. He was a brave men. RIP
He very eloquently and bravely fought the religious bigots of Pakistan. Pakistanis across the globe will miss you.
Thank;you Nadeem. Long time ago Allama Iqbal said: hazaron saal nargis apni be-noori pe rotee hai; Bari mushkil se hota hai chaman men deedawar paida. I hope you are Cowasjee’s replacement!
Pakistan will not survive a thousand years.
A splendidly written article by Mr. Nadeem Paracha, one of the few that do not give of a stench of his profound hatred of the religious parties and his beloved ‘Mullahs”
I too used to read his columns, but I now realise his voice of reason, was lost in storm of religious madness, which has slowly but surely engulfed Pakistan.
I feel Jinnah failed his people, he exploited the religious card to gain Pakistan, but could not then contain the hype. By declaring Pakistan to be secular, he confused his followers and is one of the causes of the ”crisis in identity’ in the minds of the people of this new nation.
Jinnah failed too in his language policy, by declaring, only ‘Urdu’ as the national language. Thus, sowing the seeds of later Bengali disillusions and eventual breakup of Pakistan.
Jinnah’s Kashmir decision to send tribesmen to torment revolt there, also backfired, as it frightened the Raja into acceding to India – thus laying the foundations of ‘ state of constant threat of war’ with India.
I do realise, that there are a lot of decent people in Pakistan, but I fear they have lost the will to fight the ‘ Establishment’ which now controls the destiny of Pakistan.
May God give him the peace, he so desired, in Heaven.
@Jaggy
Absolutely incorrect. People who have met Quid-e-Azam Muhmmad Ali Jinnah ( like cowasjee, and Nawab Akbar Bugti (not like you and me)) always praised Jinnah as a fine man. Cowasjee even as a non-muslim always admired Jinnah. Nawab Bugti even said once that when we (Baluch) will separate from Pakistan we will adopte the name ‘Pakistan’ as our new homeland. Anyway this is not the right place to start argument on Pakistan existence which Indians always seems to do.
@Atif,
Jaggy is not disputing Jinnah being a nice man, but what he is pointing to are valid facts specially the argument around declaring Urdu as the national language since that created the rift right at the beginning which culminated in the separation of Pakistan which also invalidated the two nation theory. Historical facts are nothing to be ashamed of and are no disrespect to Jinnah.
I never said that Jinnah was not a fine man, I am sure he was. He was also a fine lawyer who won all the cases he took up, including Pakistan.
However, he was lacking in his skills as a politician and laid a very weak foundation, for the country to take further. This is apparent, when we see Pakistans current problems.
Rephrasing our barbarian foes, Nadeem F. Paracha let me say this “one Ardesher Cowasjee’s death will spring millions of Cowasjees”. Mr Cowasjee was very kind to me and in you NFP I see the same zeal and clarity of thought without the Pakistani emotionalism. Keep writing and trust me Ardesher Cowasjee has touched more than a few people in Pakistan and against all odds they are not going to be silent either in thoughts, words or actions as per the Zoroastrian tenents. May his soul Rest in Peace, if it did not during his lifetime in Pakistan.
@Rabia
Back in 1996 I think when NFP was not in Dawn and was working for The News he was invited as a guest speaker for the launch of a book at a hotel. I met Cowasjee’s best friend, columnist Ameena Jilani, and she said Cowasjee was in the audience as well. I asked her for the book launch, she said no, he was there to see what this new ‘mad columnist and journalist Nadeem Paracha was all about.’
NFP was way young then and had begun to make a name for himself.
Later I found out that he was Cowasjee’s neighbor as well and that Cowasjee had seen him play on the streets of Bath Island as a kid and become a ‘hooligan’ of the area.
Cowasjee was always a great supporter of raw young talent. And what you have described, it seems, Cowasjee was happy to see NFP become a popular columnist, and that too at the same newspaper.
I know you didnt have time but as a jounalist misquoting time isnt ethical either. You could just say few years ago. The artical mr paracha you refer to, uncke cowasjee wrote on feb 12th 2006 took me a few minutes on google to find, titled “the day i died”.
Thank you. Date corrected.
The only two people I read Dawn was because of Mr. Cowasjee and NFP. In fact NFP is a younger version of Mr. Cowasjee, even though he is a lot more wild.
Now it is only because of NFP I pick up Dawn, because with Cowasjee gone and Ayaz Amir writing for some other paper, Dawn now only has NFP as it’s most daring and interesting columnist.
A heartfelt tribute this, Nadeem.
Please dont say he was heart broken. He did enough good here and sawenough good come of it in smalsmall ways small successes s
RIP I regularly read his articles, living in Canada still reads Dawn daily though the new breed of writers quality are not good. One day Mr Jinnah and Cowasjee dream about Pakistan will come true inshallah.
“though the new breed of writers quality are not good” – I am sure, the new breed of writers agree with your assessment.
Hopefully in our life time.
Great loss indeed. He always raised voice for the suppressed communities.
We will miss you Cowasjee. RIP
Admiring personality, an Iconic figure and a huge loss for the Country. He will be remembered for a long long time.
Pakistan was meant to be a Secular State with a Muslim Majority and Then Bhutto and Zia came,there is still some hope left,wake up before things get more worse
RIP Ardeshir Cowasjee
“a Secular State with a Muslim Majority”. That is very confusing, even to most Pakistanis past and present. The phrase denotes ill logic. No wonder, the country is in constant turmoil.
He was a great man with great thoughts and will be missed by many.
He was a very brave and truthful human being. Great loss for Pakistan. We are sad to see you go, Mr Cowasjee. We love you and will miss you a lot. May God rest you in Jannat. Mr Nadeem Paracha has given an accurate account of Mr Cowasjee’s remarkable life history.
Mr A cowasjee was one person I used to look forward to reading. I am not from Pakistan but his thoughts, his commentary, his anger against corruption, bad politics and even worse politicians resonated with me like it did with millions of readers. Rest in Peach Mr Cowasjee. Remember one is born and dies as a human – not a muslim, christian, hindu. That in itself should give everyone a reason to get along and work for the upliftment of the humanity.
A humanitarian to the core,a warrior at heart,an undying upholder of Jinnah’s Pakistan Cowasjee wrote and spoke what a million of us believe in, but have never had the moral courage to do so.He was the voice of the Sane of this Land of the Pure(!)the crusader of all causes that affected his land,his city and the children of a lesser God.Indeed amongst the pen wielders writing in the ‘free media’, he was beyond all the pelf that is often thrown at such writers as a prize for silence.He indeed was a colossal among the pygmies that stride the land.Death may deprive us of his presence but his writings will bring solace to many and continue to be a beacon.Pakistan has lost one of Jinnah’s favourite sons.RIP.
What a loss, indeed. Great tribute, NFP. I once saw you joking with him at Dawn and he seemed to like you a lot. What a writer.
An excellent tribute to a legend. I am not sure if we are gioing to have more like him. Sorry Mr Cowajee we could not support you more to fullfil your and Jinnah’s dream of a progressive and secular Muslim state so sorry.
deeply saddened by his demise… he’ll be missed!