Forty Years Later, Meeting a Voice Again
Altaf Hussain's Seventy-Third Birthday, an Evening in London, and the Changing Face of Time
By Raja Zahid Akhtar Khanzadeh
Perhaps the cruelest irony of time is this: it strips a man of his youth but cannot erase his past. Faces change. Voices carry the fatigue of the years. The windows of memory sometimes fog over. And yet there are moments that, even after decades, set a man back down exactly where the journey of his memories first began.
An evening in London was, for me, one such moment.
The invitation to attend the seventy-third birthday celebration of Altaf Hussain, founder and leader of the MQM, came from Atif Shameem, deputy convener of the party's Coordination Committee. He had learned through mutual friends that I was in Scotland at the time. Atif Shameem, as it happens, is also from our own Texas, and that small recognition, that shared distance from home, gave the invitation a certain warmth of its own.
My schedule was already full, but I thought to myself that some invitations are not simply about attending an event — they offer a chance to see, hear, and understand, in a new age, an old character who has been peering out at us from behind the windows of history. So I borrowed a few hours from my commitments and set off from Glasgow to London with my friend Rehan.
Once in London, I first had the opportunity to visit the MQM secretariat, known within party circles by the shorthand of its address — "185." The building reminded me instantly of Nine Zero in Karachi. The same air of political belonging, the same sense of organizational life humming beneath the surface, the same feeling that even the walls have absorbed decades of political history into themselves. What I saw there, who I met, what was discussed, and which flickers of Nine Zero's past I glimpsed inside those walls — that is a separate story, one I will bring to you soon in its own report.
For now, let us return to that evening, when we finally arrived at Altaf Hussain's birthday celebration. The centerpiece of the gathering was his address, which ran for nearly an hour and a half — and for me, this was not simply a speech. It was a reunion with a voice I had first heard forty years earlier. I had heard him in person nearly four decades ago, and I had once met him face to face at the Press Club in Tando Allahyar.
Hearing his voice again today felt as though time had suddenly thrown open the door of some long-shut cupboard of the past. The same distinctive oratorical style, the same rise and fall of tone, the same habit of posing a question mid-conversation and then answering it himself. But forty years is not a small distance, and time leaves its mark on every human being. There were moments of repetition in his remarks, and occasional pauses in the flow of thought. Yet for me, the real substance of that moment was not a reckoning of age — it was watching how a political figure, across five decades, chooses to narrate his own past, his own ideology, his own decisions.
And then my eyes drifted from the stage to the faces filling the hall. This was not only a room of MQM workers and officials. There were people in London affiliated with Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, representatives of the Kashmiri community, and figures from other Pakistani political circles as well. But one particular sight that evening caught my attention above all else: there, in that room, sat people who had once stood outside Altaf Hussain's house in London, protesting against him. Tonight, they sat at his birthday celebration.
Altaf Hussain recognized one of them as "Chaudhry Sahib," and told the room that this was the man who used to demonstrate against him outside his own home in London. He called him forward and embraced him. Chaudhry Sahib, taking the stage, openly acknowledged that he had once been wrong.
I sat watching this scene unfold. Human beings are strange creatures. Sometimes a man becomes a wall standing against an idea, and then the experiences of life carry him to the other side of that very wall. Sometimes disagreement holds firm, sometimes opinion shifts, and sometimes a man is forced to interrogate his own past. I found myself wondering: does time change a person, or does a person, moving through time, simply begin searching for answers to questions long buried inside himself? Perhaps both are true.
A large portion of Altaf Hussain's speech circled around Pakistan's political and class structure. He made the feudal systems of Sindh, Punjab, Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa the subject of his criticism, arguing that the grip of specific classes over power and resources in Pakistan has confined the ordinary man's political participation and economic possibilities. In the same breath, he reached for an old metaphor about the "kaccha" and "pakka" bandits of rural Sindh — the kaccha dacoits, he said, hide in forests and difficult terrain, but the pakka dacoits are the ones who sit in the halls of power and authority, looting the country's resources. It was, in his telling, a political metaphor aimed at the ruling classes of Sindh and the country at large.
Recalling his party's early years, he said his purpose had been to bring into politics people who possessed no feudal estates, no great factories, no inherited claim to power. He asserted that the MQM had covered its candidates' election expenses, had carried people from ordinary backgrounds into the assemblies, the Senate, and ministries, and had, for a time, risen to become the third-largest political force in Pakistan. In his own words, this had been an attempt to give practical shape to his ideology.
There are, of course, differing views on MQM's achievements, controversies, and various eras across Pakistan's political history. But that evening, as a journalist, I was listening to his own interpretation, in his own words, of his political journey. He said, more than once, that he had never desired any ministry, any government post, or the prime ministership itself. In his telling, the real objective had been to give birth to a political idea and carry it to the people — an objective in which, he said, he had succeeded, having carried members of the middle class into the national and provincial assemblies and the Senate.
Weaving together political disagreement, state power and the question of human rights, Altaf Hussain said that Imran Khan had long been his fierce political opponent, but that today, as injustice is being done to him and his party, Khan has raised his voice in their favor. He cited Maryam Nawaz Sharif's arrest as well, saying he had spoken out against that action at the time too. Listening to him, it felt as though he was viewing the wounds of his own past through the mirror of today's politics. Oppression, he said, should never be identified by the name, party, province, or ideology of the oppressed. If injustice was done to an opponent yesterday, speaking up for that opponent today is not a departure from one's position — it is the very demand of remaining true to that principle.
His speech then walked into the darker alleys of history, where certain events still stand today as open questions. He recalled the period when General Asif Nawaz Janjua became army chief, claiming that his party was part of the government at the time and had been told that action was being planned against several figures allegedly targeted over corruption and other charges — a list, he said, that included Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir Bhutto, Pir Pagara, and other political figures. But in the end, he said, the operation's focus was turned onto the MQM instead. From that point on, the old bitterness became visible in his tone. He claimed that during the operation against the MQM, his workers and supporters were treated in ways he likened to the historical oppression inflicted on Bengalis — homes raided, people of every age arrested including minors, shirts pulled off people's backs and used to blindfold them, bodies dragged across open fields. He said that whenever he raised his voice against these actions, the response was to brand him and his party as terrorists. Referring to the current political climate — particularly the actions taken against Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab — he claimed that the intensity of the operation once carried out against the MQM had been far greater. According to him, thousands of his workers remain missing to this day, a number he put at close to seven thousand. The thrust of his argument was this: when state power is turned against someone else, those who witness it often stay silent — but when the same power knocks on their own door, the meaning of justice, law, and civil liberty suddenly begins to shift.
In this same vein, he said that some people once chanted slogans in favor of the army during the operations against the MQM, welcoming the killings of his workers by branding them terrorists — yet today, some of those very political circles, having lived through their own experiences, offer their apologies. He summed it up in a single line: fire feels different once it reaches your own house. Perhaps this is one of the tragedies of human societies — the smoke rising from someone else's house often looks to us like nothing more than weather, a passing haze, until the fire reaches our own door.
He said his opposition was not to any individual, province, or party, but to a system in which power places itself above the law. He said he opposed Sindh's feudal landlord structures, the feudal frameworks of Punjab and other provinces, corruption, and any political arrangement in which democratic institutions are made subordinate to military authority. In the same conversation, he invoked the example of Oliver Cromwell from British history, whose remains were exhumed after his death and symbolically hanged, drawing a comparison between that historical episode and the alleged manipulation of Pakistan's election results, particularly the controversy over Form 47 — comparing, in effect, the political and constitutional systems of Britain and Pakistan. He then turned to the journalists and audience members present and asked whether anyone could name Britain's current army chief. No name came back from the room. Altaf Hussain folded that silence directly into his political argument, saying that this was precisely the kind of system he wished to see in Pakistan — one in which state institutions operate within their constitutional limits, and where elected civilian representatives remain the true center of political power. He coined his own term for Pakistan's system: not democracy, he said, but "statocracy" — a system in which the centers of state power dominate elected institutions. He spoke also of religious extremism and "Talibanization," alleging that religion and the name of Islam had, in the past, been used for specific political and strategic purposes, the consequences of which were borne especially by the people of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa — consequences, he said, the country still lives with today.
But one line from that long political address stayed with me above all others. Altaf Hussain recounted that when he began speaking in Imran Khan's favor, some of his own workers asked him: this man opposed you bitterly in the past — why do you speak for him now? His answer to them, as he recalled it: "My son, have you forgotten the training I gave you? Don't look at who did wrong by you — look at what good you can do for someone." Listening to that line, I found myself thinking that the real test of principle in politics comes, perhaps, precisely at the moment when the demand for justice must be raised not for a friend, but for an adversary. Wanting justice for oneself is a natural instinct; recognizing that same right for one's opponent is a different, harder moral test altogether.
That evening in London, Altaf Hussain was narrating the events, the grievances, and the positions of his political life. Room remains, of course, for historical scrutiny of each of his claims, and for disagreement with them — but his remarks nonetheless placed one fundamental question squarely before us: do we treat justice as a fixed, unchanging principle, or do we redefine its meaning each time depending on whose name is attached to the injustice? Because the history of oppression is not written only by the hands that carry it out; it also preserves, permanently, the silence of the eyes that witness it and choose to look away.
He said he had always raised his voice for the oppressed and against oppression, regardless of which party, province, or school of thought the oppressed belonged to. At one point during the gathering, an old scene from the past suddenly came back to life in that London hall. Altaf Hussain addressed the MQM workers present and, in his signature style, began counting on his fingers — "One, two, three, four!" — and then, silence fell. Watching this, my memory carried me back decades, to when a single gesture from Altaf Hussain could bring a gathering of hundreds of thousands to instant, total silence, as though someone had stilled an ocean of noise in a single moment. Tonight in London, I caught a glimpse of that same old habit again. The crowd was smaller, the era had changed, but the gesture was the same, and the silence that answered it carried the same echo of the past.
Throughout the address, he moved between serious political discussion, sharp sarcasm, and the occasional joke that sent ripples of laughter through the room. And so this hour and a half traveled between political grievances, personal memories, bitter episodes, and light humor. On the subject of the army, he clarified that his opposition was not to the institution itself or to its ordinary soldiers, but to the policies of a handful of generals whose decisions, in his view, have cost the country and the nation dearly. He also spoke of former companions who had parted ways with the party, and there was visible bitterness in his tone as he did — yet he said that while people may leave, paths may change, and loyalties may shift over the course of a political journey, he himself remains committed to the very ideology he laid down decades ago.
And I found myself thinking that the history of politics is never only a story of slogans, rallies, and power. Hidden within it are also the stories of companions who fall away, relationships that transform, and old memories that take on new meaning. Gatherings change with time, faces change, but sometimes a single old gesture suddenly throws open a shuttered window of memory, and a person realizes that the past does pass — but it does not always stay behind.
At this point his remarks turned to the recent attempt on his life, and to those older, darker alleys where politics has also carried questions of life and death. Altaf Hussain spoke of the assassination attempts made against him, saying that after grenade attacks and threats to his life in Pakistan, the Coordination Committee had advised him to leave the country. He shared a personal recollection: his brother was living in America at the time, and he had been offered the chance to obtain permanent residency there, but instead of accepting it, he asked only for a visa. Coming to London, he said, had initially been meant as a temporary decision. He had wanted to return to Pakistan, but the Coordination Committee opposed his return given concerns for his safety. These were details he narrated himself. Listening to him, I found myself thinking about how strange a condition exile is. A man leaves a city believing he will return within days, and sometimes those days stretch into years. The way home is remembered, but the date of return gets lost somewhere in the dust of time. A person can live thousands of miles from his homeland — but can he ever travel quite that far from his own past? Perhaps not.
At this same gathering came a moment that turned personally pleasant and memorable for me. Altaf Hussain, from the stage, called out my name, saying that Raja Zahid Akhtar Khanzadeh had come from America, that he was a good journalist and columnist, and that he regularly read my columns. He then invited me up onto the stage and presented me with a signed copy of his book, in which he had written, for me, this prayer: "May you remain forever safe and well, Amen."
In a long journey through journalism, one meets countless figures, holds countless conversations, and writes countless chapters of memory — but certain moments do not remain mere meetings; they become a permanent part of memory itself. This was one such moment for me. For a writer, there is a particular pleasure in knowing that his words are reaching his reader — and then having that same reader sign his own book with a prayer for one's safety is a genuinely warm human experience. The journey of words is a strange thing after all: we hand them over to paper, and sometimes, years later, they return to us in someone else's hands, transformed into a blessing.
In this long journey through journalism, one meets an uncountable number of people. Some agree with your writing, some disagree, but for a writer it is always a source of pleasure to know that his words are reaching his readers. Over the course of my journalistic life, I have watched political parties form and fall apart, watched faces change in the halls of power, watched friendships turn into enmities and enmities turn into reconciliation. But through all of this journey, one question has stayed with me. What is the real history of any political figure? Is it the history his supporters write? The history his opponents narrate? Or is it the history that eventually emerges from documents, decisions, events, and their consequences, once enough time has passed? Perhaps the true face of history exists somewhere among all of these — and the task of journalism is to search for that face.
That evening in London was not, for me, simply a birthday celebration. It was a tableau of forty years of memory, of shifting political relationships, of old claims and present-day questions. On one side stood the cake for a seventy-third birthday; on the other, an hour and a half of speech. On one side were people who had stood beside him for years; on the other, faces that had once stood against him. And I, as a journalist, was preserving the whole scene on the pages of my own memory.
I think today that a birthday is not merely the marking of another year added to a life. It is the turning of another page in the book of one's life — a moment when a man looks back at the roads left behind him, and the world asks him what he gained on that journey, what he lost, and what still awaits the verdict of history.
Time stops for no one. It acquits no one on the basis of love, nor does it close anyone's case forever on the basis of hatred. It simply keeps recording events — until the generations that follow come to stand before them, carrying their own questions.
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