Thread by @SaharHGhazi

Happy Father’s Day! It’s Storytime.

My father is 78. In 1951, when he was 6, his father, a war hero who helped secure AJK territory for Pakistan, was sent to jail. There was a “special” trial. Planted evidence. Stolen lawyer’s fees. My Dadajan was sentenced to 7 years. 🧵1/10

Till this day, my father insists his father went to jail and came home when he was 6, even though all historical records show that my grandfather Brig Sadiq Khan spent 4 years, mostly in Balochistan’s notorious Mach Jail, as an accused in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy case. 2/10

Dadajaan was released in 1955, along with others accused in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy case when all charges were dropped. My father, his only son, was 10 at the time. While his father was in jail, my father’s life stopped, he lost 4 years of his childhood. 3/10

The special tribunal concluded my grandfather wasn’t present at the main meeting of the alleged conspiracy Feb 23, 1951, but he got the second harshest punishment of all accused. Their judgment noted it was because he had no legal representation. Someone made sure of it. 4/10

Newspapers in Pakistan turned my father’s war hero father into a traitor. His family was threatened, intimidated & robbed. His sisters were left to stay with relatives, while my father, his mother’s little male guardian accompanied her to jails in Sindh & Balochistan. 5/10

When my father did make it to school he was bullied as the son of a traitor. A conspiracy concocted by men in uniforms, my Dadajan’s very comrades, stole my father’s childhood. Until the end, my grandfather insisted Gen Ayub was guilty & involved in the ‘conspiracy’. 6/10

My father, the most empathetic human I’ve ever met, can bring cheer on the darkest days to strangers. When he’d go with his mother to meet his incarcerated father, often they’d refuse her but take my father in. He’d sing, & entertain, make his father forget he was in jail. 7/10

I cannot explain the generational trauma those 4 years and it’s aftermath had on my family. My father and his siblings were so young when their family was put through a simulated hell, they never recovered and never put the pieces together, my cousins and I now try to. 8/10

In 1984, during Gen Zia’s rule, my Dadajan Brig Sadiq Khan, who was wrongfully imprisoned 1951-55, penned these powerful TIMELESS words that apply so aptly to today’s unlawful arrests & conspiracies. He wrote them as a preface to a book of Iqbal’s poems he translated. Read👇🏽9/10

Dadajan was a brilliant kind man, an exceptional grandfather & writer. He died when I was 15. I often wonder why such an extraordinary writer never wrote about the most extraordinary thing that happened to him. He translated poetry of our greats instead. 10 - end🧵