One of India's most influential front-line freedom fighters, Ali Sardar Jafri, passed away on Tuesday at the age of 86 in a hospital in Bombay, where he was under treatment for brain tumor, it was announced by the Zee News on Tuesday evening.
Confirming the Zee News, an AFP dispatch from Bombay said that Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee sent a condolence message to his family in which he said, "Throughout his life Sardar Jafri used his intellectual abilities to relentlessly campaign against imperialism, oppression and class discrimination." Born in Balrampur, Uttar Pradesh (UP), on November 29, 1916, Sardar Jafri was frequently jailed during British Raj, which ended on Aug. 15, 1947. He was one of founders of a prominent literary society, the Association of Progressive Writers (APW).
Poets, writers and critics of Hindi and Urdu languages belonging to the APW started their struggle against the British colonial rule in the Indian Subcontinent. Consequently, most of them were sentenced to jail several times.
When he was in jail, Sardar Jafri wrote two collections of poems titled, "Pathar ki Deewar" (the Wall of Stones) and "Avadh ke Fake Haseen" (Avadh is a famous and historical district of India's largest state, UP), the book's title means (the Beautiful People of Avadh).
As Prime Minister Vajpayee said, Sardar Jafri devoted his entire life to the eradication of class discrimination in the Indian society where the people were formerly treated on the basis of the caste they belonged to.
A low-caste person could not even dare to sit beside a high-caste individual.
Of course much of the credit goes to the Indian nation's father Mahatma Gandhi, who started his campaign against class discrimination from South Africa, where white people treated Blacks like their slaves.
The situation was the same in India, where some shops, restaurants and clubs warned on their sign boards that Indians and Dogs Are Not Allowed.' India had a long history of class discrimination, but the colonialists fanned the flame of caste and religious discrimination to a great extent.
Under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, millions fought against class discrimination and managed to promote their cause considerably.
The writer of these lines has had the honor to meet Sardar Jafri and many of his associates during their visits to Bhopal, capital of Madhya Pradesh State, which is an important center of social, cultural and literary activities.
Bhopal also gave rise to famous poets such as Sheri Bhopali, Assad Bhopali, Kaif Bhopali, Taj Bhopali, Akhtar Saeed Khan, Saeed Akhtar, Jahan Qadra Chughtai and many others.
The writer once asked Sardar Jafri about his views on the future of India. Sounding optimistic, he said, "We are a great nation and none can stop our prosperous future." "Of course," said Sardar Jafri in the early 1960s, "We, Indians, remained under colonial rule for more than a century, and this created numerous problems in the way of our progress and prosperity.
This is why we are now experiencing a slow pace of the development." According to an AFP dispatch, India's prominent politician Prime Minister Vajpayee presented ousted Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif with Sardar Jafri's poetry book Sarhad', or border, during his historic bus trip to Lahore last year.
"Whatever Sardar Jafri wrote in verse or prose was nothing but a message of peace and love to all humans," an expert on Indian affairs Ms. Tahera Sultan told the TEHRAN TIMES here yesterday.
Ms. Sultan further said, "Sardar Jafri and thousands of adherents of different religions in India believed that no discrimination should be made against anyone in the world based on his caste, color or religion, and they did their utmost to abolish such discrimination." "The realities in today's India bear witness to the fact that these messengers of peace and love succeeded to a great extent in accomplishing their sacred objective," she noted, while recalling her recent visit to Bombay and Bhopal, where she stayed for some three months.
The Zee News broadcast a footage in which Sardar Jafri said, "My aim of life is nothing but to air the message of love for humans."