Roedad khan biography examples

Roedad Khan was divisional commissioner of Quetta when I was in school in the capital of Balochistan in the s. As an important civil servant in Pakistan's central government, he would rise higher and by the time came round, he had become secretary of the central ministry of information. Roedad Khan was in Dhaka during the period of the Yahya-Mujib-Bhutto negotiations in March

Why do I write about Roedad Khan? He has turned a hundred years old and tributes have been and are being paid to him in Pakistan. Mine is not a paean to the man but a simple, short recollection of his role at a very decisive point in Pakistan's history. Quite some years ago, Brigadier A.R. Siddiqi, who was head of the Pakistan military's Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) in and was also in Dhaka in March , wrote a book, East Pakistan: The Endgame: An Onlooker's Journal  

In his work, Siddiqi notes that within hours of Operation Searchlight being launched by the Pakistan army, even as the soldiers went on with their killing mission in Dhaka, Roedad Khan went to the cantonment, where Tikka Khan and all the other generals were having a hearty breakfast, and cheerfully announced, 'Yar, imaan taaza ho gya (friends, faith has been revived)'. The comment was an indication of his happiness at the action the Pakistan army had taken against the Bengalis. In that dark hour, Roedad Khan thought his country was basking in light.

Many years later, an aged and superannuated Roedad Khan appeared on Pakistan's Geo TV to proffer his reflections on the anniversary of the Pakistan army's surrender in Dhaka on 16 December What Khan told the anchor of the programme was quite a deviation from what he was quoted by Siddiqi to have said in late March at Dhaka cantonment. He said, on Geo TV, that he had advised General Yahya Khan to go for a political rather than a military solution to the crisis in East Pakistan. But Yahya Khan went for a military assault, with predictabl

ROEDAD Khan, a veteran bureaucrat who witnessed history from multiple perches and served several rulers — from General Ayub Khan to Nawaz Sharif — passed away on Sunday at the age of

Born in Mardan in pre-partition India, Mr Khan had celebrated his th birthday on September 23, last year. His passing was announced by prominent politician and relative, Mushahid Hussain Sayed.

“He lived a full life of service to Pakistan during our most tumultuous period plus post retirement: pioneered Environmental Protection for Islamabad, authored books and became bold activist for democracy and human rights! Truly a unique, multifaceted personality of our times! He will be missed by his countless admirers!” he posted on X.

Mr Khan is survived by five sons and a daughter. He was laid to rest at the H graveyard, and his funeral was attended by a number of prominent individuals, including Afrasiab Khattak, Wasim Sajjad, Raja Zafarul Haq, Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, Riaz Muhammad Khan, Faisal Javed and others.

A storied career

An alumnus of Lahore’s Forman Christian (FC) College and the Aligarh Muslim University, Mr Khan joined the Pakistan Administrative Service in

In the Ayub Khan-era, he served as deputy commissioner in Peshawar and was later the commissioner of Karachi from to , around the time the capital was being shifted to Islamabad.

Mr Khan served as the head of Pakistan Television during the historic election under Yahya Khan. Then, under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, he served as the federal secretary of tourism department. Under General Ziaul Haq, he became the federal interior secretary between and

When that tenure came to an end, Mr Khan was appointed secretary general of the interior ministry by his friend and long-time colleague, Ghulam Ishaq Khan. When he finally quit the civil service, Roedad Khan was immediately appointed the minister of accountability during Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s first tenure in power, in

But Mr Khan did not dwell much on the controversia

In a guest room at the political agent’s fort in Zhob lurked the ghost of a British official murdered there by his native orderly. Roedad Khan – the political agent in – was not sure how to tell a visiting dignitary on a hunting trip about the guest room being haunted. When he eventually did, his guest – the most powerful man in the land – just laughed it off.

Two years later, Roedad Khan was standing in front of his powerful guest — Ayub Khan, the commander in chief of the military, who had just taken over power in a bloodless coup. ‘Go off to Ghulam Muhammad Barrage (in Kotri, Sindh) and distribute lands among whosoever wants to be a cultivator,’ Roedad Khan was told and off he went.

At the time, Roedad Khan was working as Deputy Commissioner of Peshawar — a grade below the post of project director that Ayub Khan handed to him, along with powers to allot as many as million acres of land. “I was the head of all the departments working on bringing all that land under cultivation,” says Roedad Khan. On a daily basis, he would issue orders for the digging up of water channels, building of roads, construction of health and sanitation facilities, setting up of farmers’ cooperatives, so on and so forth. “Every morning, I would roll up my sleeves and get into my jeep.”

The objective of his jaunts was to “colonise the land”, a bureaucratic term for bringing land under canal-irrigated cultivation and parcelling it out to eligible farmers. Roedad Khan had the power to allot acres of land to whosoever he deemed a serious cultivator. A lot of retiring bureaucrats and former senior military officials managed to have big tracts of land allotted to them, as did a big number of abadgars (settler farmers), mostly from Punjab.

Another bureaucrat was allotting lands to similarly ‘eligible’ candidates in western Punjab, where vast tracts of the Thal desert were made arable through a canal brought from the Indus River. “What I did in Ghulam Muhammad Barrage, Zafarul Ahsan d

Roedad Khan has passed away this month, at the ripe old age of Born in a village near Mardan in September , he breathed his last in Islamabad on 21 April  During his active life, he was a pillar of the bureaucracy, earning respect for his acumen and financial honesty. He served with five presidents, i.e. Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan, Bhutto, Zia-ul-Haq and Ghulam Ishaq Khan, and knew Farooq Leghari intimately. He was a quintessential bureaucrat who remained part of the inner circles within the corridors of power – from Ayub Khan’s presidential election in January to the dismissal of government in July

His bureaucratic career spanned forty years. During his long service, he held many crucial positions. He was Commissioner Karachi, Chief Secretary Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (NWFP under his term), and managing director (MD) for Pakistan Television. He remained, at various times, federal secretary for the ministries of Information, Labour, Tourism and the Interior. He was advisor to prime ministers and presidents. His last appointment was as federal minister for Accountability. This is an apt career for a brilliant, hardworking individual. He wrote his autobiography in titled Pakistan - A Dream Gone Sour and compiled his newspaper articles in four volumes. A brief look into his career would reveal the kind of legacy that he has left behind.

Roedad Khan was Commissioner Karachi during the elections of Despite massive rigging against Fatima Jinnah, she had won in East Pakistan and Karachi. The regime felt the need to punish the people of Karachi. The day after the elections, Gohar Ayub, the son of the dictator, in the guise of a victory parade, led a raid on the Urdu-speaking community, resulting in the death of over two dozen people. In his book (ibid), Roedad says that he was unaware of the planned parade and that the DIG, too, remained unaware because he had unplugged his phone. This claim of ignorance is strange, coming as it is from the hig