close
Friday March 29, 2024

The funeral of an unmourned philosopher

By Zubair Ashraf
January 16, 2018

The Sunday night was as frightening as the preceding morning. The aura was silently anguished. A few hundred people had gathered for the burial of Professor Dr Hasan Zafar Arif at the Sakhi Hasan graveyard. At 8pm, it was completely dark, and crows were cawing and restlessly hovering over the site.

“You should not have come here,” a senior journalist who is also a university teacher whispered to a student activist standing beside him. The activist belonged to the Muttahida Qaumi Movement-London. “I just came to pay respect to Ustad, sir,” he replied. The teacher responded with a half-smile and said, “May you live long!”

Dr Arif, a marxist who headed the Pakistan chapter of the MQM-London in a time when it faced a blanket ban by the state, was found dead in suspicious circumstances on the backseat of his car in a remote area of Ibrahim Hyderi on Sunday. His party, friends, colleagues and students believe he was killed.

The faces of the people at the burial were hardly visible and apparently some of them preferred it that way. “There was pressure on the family,” another university teacher and a comrade of Dr Arif said to the activist as he asked why a protest was not lodged against the killing. “It will be,” the teacher replied.

People continued to converge in smaller groups as the undertaker prepared the grave. The word about Dr Arif’s final rites was spread through WhatsApp and other social media platforms as the mainstream media was muzzled to a greater extent. It was all discreet. Almost nobody talked but their eyes did the talking.

“What unit [are you from]?” the activist asked, striking up a conversation with a group of four on two motorcycles looking here and there for something. “A,” they replied, after a pause. “Go straight and take second left.” He described the directions and walked away in the street where the casket carrier bus and other vehicles of the mourners were parked.

Faces that were seen outside the mortuary at the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre were found there too. “Dr Arif was the kind of a person who would love his enemies,” a person who identified himself as an old student of him said while talking to this scribe. “He was a symbol of resistance and nearly all progressive elements across the world admired him.”

Talking to the BBC, Dr Seemin Jamali and Dr Arif’s brother said that there were no marks of torture or violence on his body when it was discovered. However, people at the funeral were sceptical.

Rather saying it outright, Dr Arif’s student commented that the blood on the face and shirt of Dr Arif negated the hospital version that he died a natural death. “Do they mean that Dr Saab drove all the way from Saddar to Ibrahim Hyderi, got into the backseat of his car and then decided to die?” he said.

A colleague of Dr Arif, who was with him when he left for his home in Defence, said that they had a meeting with an MQM worker from Pishin. “He, however, excused himself, saying that he wanted to spend time with his daughter visiting him from England. She had to fly back today [Sunday].”

Dr Arif was tasked with the reorganisation of the MQM-London after all its bodies, including the top coordination committee, had been dissolved on December 31. “He had his methods and networks,” the colleague said over the presence of non-Muhajir activists in the ethno-nationalist party. “The movement was getting bigger, by the way.”

The MQM-London activist, mentioned above, had met Dr Arif once, just for five minutes. “It was in the flat of a friend of Dr Saab. We exchanged numbers and he asked me to stay in touch,” he recalled. “We were sitting across on a sofa and I was impressed the very moment he puffed his cigarette. Philosophy was in the air,” he said.