Chaudhry Zahoor Elahi

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Chaudhry Zahoor Elahi (died 25 September 1981) was a Pakistani politician. He founded a political family.

He began his career in the late 1930s as a police constable of the Punjab, although after allegations of corruption he was dismissed from the force^[1] and afterwards became a cotton manufacturer in the East Punjab, in an area becoming part of India in the 1947 Partition. He moved to Pakistan, and ran a textile mill.^[2] He settled in Gujrat. He was a Jat of the Warriach clan^[3]. He entered local politics in the 1950s.^[4] During Ayub Khan's time, Zahoor Elahi aspired to be governor of West Pakistan - Nawab Kalabagh, the incumbent governor, jokingly told his friends that if Elahi were not careful, he would put him in his proper place and reinstate him a constable^[1]. As secretary-general to the Convention Muslim League, he came to oppose Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.^[5] In his conflict with Bhutto, he was imprisoned, and family property was taken by the Government^[6], he was assassinated in 1981.

[edit] Family

Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain^[2], son, Prime Minister in 2004
Chaudhry Wajahat Hussain, son
Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi^[7], nephew, Chief Minister

Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, 158, the prime minister-elect of Pakistan, and president of the ruling party, the Pakistan Muslim League, has been in politics for the last 25 years. He belongs to the Chaudhry clan of Gujarat, who have always been known to support the military establishment. And, not surprisingly, their biradari tops the list of those political families of Pakistan who have been the main beneficiaries of all military regimes. They have served the military establishment loyally since the days of General Ayub Khan, when Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain's father, Chaudhry Zahoor Elahi, was appointed secretary-general of the Convention Muslim League that had been cobbled together by the military dictator to serve his interests.

Hussain's father, Chaudhry Zahoor Elahi, a police constable in pre-Partition days, came from the lower middle class and had no political background. After the birth of Pakistan, he bought a textile mill and, in the early 1950s, entered local politics with the support of a local influential, Chaudhry Fazl Elahi, who became president of the country when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was prime minister. Zahoor Elahi, however, soon fell out with Fazl Elahi and formed his own faction on the strength of the sizeable Jat clan that have traditionally opposed Gujarat's traditional elite, the Nawabzadgan of the Gujjar clan.

In return for state patronage, hefty bank loans and write-offs, Zahoor Elahi and his family, comprising his sons and nephews, always joined hands with military rulers from General Ayub Khan (1958-68) to General Zia-ul-Haq (1977-88) and General Pervez Musharraf (October 1999) and have served them well. Elahi's family is now one of the leading industrial houses, owning sugar, textile and flour mills, in addition to agricultural farms.

While Shujaat Hussain and his two brothers, Chaudhry Wajahat Hussain, an MNA, and Chaudhry Shafaat Hussain, district nazim of Gujarat, and a first cousin and brother-in-law, Chaudhry Pervez Elahi, the present chief minister of the Punjab, are full-time politicians, his sons, along with the sons of Chaudhry Pervez Elahi run the family business.

Zahoor Elahi was a bitter opponent of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and was detained for several years during his tenure, on charges which did not stand in a court of law, and was later declared a 'prisoner of conscience' by Amnesty International.

When General Zia-ul-Haq took over, he released Elahi and made him a federal minister in his cabinet. It was Elahi who presented him the pen with which Zia-ul-Haq signed Mr Bhutto's death warrant. In September 1981, Elahi was shot dead in Lahore and the blame was laid at the doorstep of his political opponents, the Al-Zulfikar, Murtaza Bhutto's organisation.

Shujaat Hussain entered politics following the murder of his father and, in 1982, was made a member of General Zia-ul-Haq's hand-picked consultative body, the Majlis-i-Shoora, and later elevated to the federal cabinet. In 1985, he won the non-party elections as a member of the National Assembly from Gujarat, a seat that he has won four times since, and lost only once, to the PPP's Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar in 1993. He was elected senator on losing the National Assembly election.