EDITORIAL: Begum Nasim Wali Khan who passed away on Sunday was a high-flying political leader of her time. Born to an important figure in the Khudai Khidmatgar Movement – precursor of the National Awami Party (NAP) – Ameer Mohammad Khan Hoti, she married Khan Abdul Wali Khan in 1954. But it was not until much later, i.e., in the tumultuous seventies that she herself entered the political arena, when her Pakhtun nationalist husband was jailed and tried on treason charges, and the NAP declared defunct. Several senior NAP leaders also faced the same charges, widely seen as politically motivated. Begum Nasim Wali waged a tireless struggle for the release of her husband and his colleagues. No small challenge was also to prevent the party from falling into disarray. She joined other leaders to form the National Democratic Party (NDP) led by a NAP stalwart, Sardar Sher Baz Khan Mazari.
She participated in the 1977 general elections and won two general seats, the first time a woman in this country successfully contested general seats. This was no small feat considering that she came from the conservative culture of the then NWFP; that too at a time the entire political scene was dominated by male politicians. She also played a prominent role in the ’77 anti-government agitation, which culminated in the ouster of prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and imposition of martial law by Gen Ziaul Haq. There are some ifs and buts about what led to that disastrous event as well as many uncomfortable questions about the role different actors played in it. Not too long afterwards, though, the Hyderabad Tribunal was disbanded and Wali Khan and others walked free. Though she kept a low profile in the following years, Begum Wali remained active in electoral politics. She became parliamentary leader of the Awami National Party (which replaced NDP in 1986) also getting elected later on for four consecutive terms as MPA from her family’s Charsadda constituency till ’97. However, she developed differences with the ANP much before the demise of her husband and the leadership mantle going to her step son, Asfandyar Wali, founding her own faction of the ANP. In due course, nonetheless, she made peace with the other side, merging her faction in 2017 with the main party led by Asfandyar Wali.
Various politicians, friends and rivals, have paid well deserved tributes to the departed soul. A former chief minister of the PML-N and ANP coalition government in the erstwhile NWFP (since renamed as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) Sardar Mehtab Abbasi, described her as “a political stalwart”, adding “she was a woman of great moral characters, an attribute that is hard to retain in practical politics.”
Copyright Business Recorder, 2021
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