Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury Qaim Ali Shah’s ministry, not praise him.
But…
For eight years, this veteran politician has borne the brunt of some very scathing criticism. Though some of this criticism was reasonable, a large portion of it was absolutely unwarranted. The Punjabi-Urdu-speaking-dominate
There are some persisting myths about Qaim Ali Shah that need busting. Now that the fellow has gone, perhaps the mainstream media could point certain things out. To borrow again from Mark Antony’s speech that I paraphrased mercilessly, “The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.”
First, he is not a feudal. Though one doesn’t really know what the term feudal means in 2016, Qaim Ali Shah isn’t what people think they are talking about when they use the word. He was born to a middle-class family, not one of Sindh’s bigwig families, where a political career comes with the surname. Qaim Ali Shah trained as a lawyer and also practised his trade. Few outside Sindh know that he is one of the party’s activist-members, who rose through the ranks in a very long political career.
Why do people assume he is a wadera, then? Because he is Sindhi and, as mentioned before, any person of power from the ethnicity cannot be imagined out of the image that the one-dimensional Karachi centre PTV plays had crafted back in the day. One would have thought his brilliant, professional daughters would have done away with his image as a retrogressive feudal, but that didn’t happen.
Second, in the unfortunate culture of unfettered corruption that has plagued Sindh, the former CM himself has never been named in any corruption scandal. It’s a tall order, to have a spotless financial reputation in an environment like that.
Incoming Murad Ali Shah, him of NED and Stanford, him of studiously prepared arguments in Sindh’s interests (he is an impressive man, to say the least) is, in fact, a feudal. And on the financial front, his father, a former CM himself, didn’t enjoy quite the pristine reputation that the outgoing CM did.
A number of Sindh’s problems stem from an ecosystem in which the province’s chief minister is but one part. The ethnic, political, religious and economic powderkeg that the city had become has required a mild-mannered peacemaker to mend fences. Qaim Ali Shah was that man. He wasn’t the moustache-twirling cartoon villain that the media would have you think Sindhi politicians are.
