Journeys to democracy

Former journalist Eric Rahim’s thoughtful obituary of Dr Ghalib Khan Lodhi (1930-2012), one of the founding members of DSF, who passed away in Karachi recently… Solas Educational Trust, supporting schools in Chitral, remains Ghalib’s most important legacy

“Goodbye, generous friend, earnest and upright, seeker of knowledge”

Dr Ghalib Lodhi, London, 2001. Still from video footage by Beena Sarwar

Ghalib, who has recently died of cancer, was a founding member of the Democratic Students Federation and, along with Mohammad Sarwar, Hashmi, Haroon, Ayub Mirza, Yousaf Ali, SM Naseem and others, a leading activist in the early 1950s student movement in Karachi. I remember him as one of the most serious minded among his cohort. While a medical student, in his early twenties, he was trying to grapple with Das Kapital.

Along with so many others – students, journalists, writers, and trade unionists – he was arrested in the general round-up that took place in West Pakistan in the wake of the triumph of the United Front in East Pakistan elections of 1954 and Pakistan government’s decision to sign military pacts with the United States. Before his arrest he was acting as general manager of the organ of the Democratic Student Federation, the Students’ Herald. Naseem, who was the editor of the Herald, in a recent communication described to me the occasion of the arrest in the following words..…

Read more at: Dr. Ghalib Khan Lodhi (1930-2012) – A personal memoir by Eric Rahim.

Filed under: Progressive politics | Tagged: Ayub Mirza, DSF, Eric Rahim, Ghalib Lodhi, Haroon, Hashmi, Mohammad Sarwar, SM Naseem, Yousaf Ali | Leave a comment »