MNA Gulzar Khan passes away

PESHAWAR: Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Member National Assembly (MNA) Gulzar Khan, who served as a senior bureaucrat before retirement, passed away here on Monday.

His largely attended funeral prayers were offered at his village Mashogagar near Badaber in suburbs of Peshawar and he was laid to rest in his ancestral graveyard.

According to PTI sources, Gulzar Khan was suffering from heart disease for some years now and died of cardiac arrest.

His health had deteriorated recently and he could not even walk properly. He had health complications and had become quite weak.

The bureaucrat-turned-politician after retirement from civil service joined the PTI and was elected the MNA from NA-4 comprising rural Peshawar in the May 2013 general election. He managed to defeat by a large margin well-established politicians belonging to the ANP, PPP, JUI-F and PML-N.

However, Gulzar Khan developed serious differences with the PTI Chairman Imran Khan during the 2014 dharna in Islamabad undertaken by the party to oust Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif from power. He refused to resign from his National Assembly seat when Imran Khan directed his party’s MNAs to resign as a mark of protest against the alleged rigging in the 2013 general election. He and three other PTI MNAs from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa took the plea that the party should also direct its MPAs in the province to resign and quit the provincial government to bring greater pressure on the PML-N-led federal government to accept the PTI demands.

Gulzar Khan held key positions during his service as a civil servant. He served as deputy commissioner Peshawar for a number of years. He remained a commissioner, political agent of North Waziristan, secretary Home and Tribal Affairs Department, and Commissioner Afghan Refugees. His last posting was chairman of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Public Service Commission.

He was a well read man and was a firm and strong-willed bureaucrat.

Gulzar Khan was an influential landlord of Mashogagar and was widely respected for his close links with his people and the welfare works he did for them.

He was a brave person as he chose to live in his village at a time when most of the resourceful people of his area shifted to Peshawar and Islamabad due to the insecurity. The militancy had also affected his native area and it was dangerous living there.

PTI sources told The News that Gulzar Khan had stopped attending the party meetings after he defied the directives of Imran Khan in 2014.

“He had almost quit the PTI and stopped attending the party meetings for quite a long time,” said a PTI member.

Imran Khan didn’t attend his funeral, but he expressed grief over the loss of Gulzar Khan though his Twitter message. He wrote that he was saddened to learn of his party MNA Gulzar Khan’s passing away.