“I am not educated. But I have read Marx and Lenin’s books. I have read about the lives of those who took part in Karbala. Let me tell you: The real war is between the rich and the poor, the tyrants and the oppressed.”
Abdul Sattar Edhi

Abdul Sattar Edhi has passed from this world to the next. Pakistan has lost a giant today.

At a time when our country is being ripped apart by poverty, injustice and unprecedented levels of violence, Edhi was a guiding light at a time of darkness. When the rest of us cowed away, turning our backs to the poor, the marred, and the dead, he went out into the darkness of the day and the night to cradle the lives and bodies of those whom the world had chosen to forget. From the babies whose mothers were forced to give them up to the old and the injured that everyone had forgotten; from the corpses of the missing in Balochistan and Sindh to those killed in the explosions of violence in Karachi; Edhi spent his life in the service of the most vulnerable amongst us. With his wife and his children, and the thousands upon thousands of ambulance drivers and coordinators and nurses and care-takers and many others, Edhi built a palace in a desert–a place of refuge for both the living and the dead.

There are many who are calling Edhi a humanitarian. If humanitarianism means service to humanity, he is surely the greatest humanitarian of all. “I made humanity my religion, and devoted my life to it,” he once said. Yet, in this day and age, humanitarianism has come to be associated with the corporate and the apolitical. Edhi, however, was neither woed by the temptations of the charity-industrial complex, nor unconcerned with the deeply political fight for equality and justice. With his family, he lived a life stripped of the luxuries that he could have easily enjoyed, choosing to give his all to build an infrastructure of services that should have been provided by the state. As for his work, it was all but apolitical. It was infused with a political rage that emerges from the hearts of those who see injustice for what it is: A case of the rich pillaging the poor, enslaving them in structures of oppression that no amount of charity can ever break them free of.

This political commitment was infused in every single initiative that he Edhi carried out. From the ambulances that went into corners of Pakistan’s most violent cities to the orphanages that gave our children without parents the home they deserved. For Edhi, the wretchedness that he was fighting against was infused with the same sense of injustice that permeates a politics of the Left. Communist writings were among his earliest influences. This was an influence he combined with the stories of the weak battling the powerful in the stories of Islam–the rich fighting the poor in the stories of the streets. After reading articles on communism in his early years, the anger we know all too well rose in him.“A feeling of hatred kept rising in my heart for a particular class of people who were the main causes of poverty in the world, they were the ones creating problems and hurdles and no one was doing anything to stop this from happening,” he said. “I have been in Pakistan for the past 60 years, no one is ready to talk about the problems here.” In light of the apathy that he faced, Edhi made a decision. “I was young and uneducated and I didn’t have the resources to make a change or revolutionise the system, but I had a passion to help those in need and help them get their rights.”

That is why, today, the Awami Workers Party mourns not just the death of a heroic Pakistani, but of a fellow comrade. It appeal to all Pakistanis to observe a three days mourning in memory of Comrade Edhi,

Surkh Salam, Comrade Edhi. Rest in Power.

A joint statement by

1- Abid Hassan Minto,
President AWP
2- Fanoos Gujjar
Chairman AWP
3- Farooq Tariq
General Secretary
Awami Workers Party