MULTAN: Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz leader, former member of the Provincial Assembly and former provincial minister of Punjab, Haji Ehsanuddin Qureshi, has passed away.
His funeral prayers will be offered on 1 September.
Expressions of sorrow have been made by political and social circles over the death of Haji Ehsanuddin Qureshi.
The funeral prayers of the League leader Haji Ehsanuddin Qureshi will be offered at 10am on 1 September at Aam Khas Bagh, Multan.
Haji Ehsanuddin Qureshi belonged to the tier of Pakistani politics that receives the least attention and does much of the work: the provincial legislator who serves a constituency over decades, holds a portfolio in a provincial cabinet, and never becomes a national figure.
That role has a particular character in southern Punjab. A member of the Punjab Assembly from Multan operates in a political environment shaped by biradari networks, agricultural constituencies, spiritual lineages and the long-standing sense that the region’s development has lagged behind the centre and north of the province. Constituency politics there is intensely personal — measured in transfers arranged, disputes mediated, and access provided to a district administration that is otherwise remote from most citizens.
Multan itself has been a durable centre of PML-N organisation, contested continuously with the Pakistan Peoples Party and, more recently, with Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf. Politicians who held provincial seats there across multiple cycles did so by building an organisational base that survived changes of government, periods of military rule and the repeated realignment of parties.
The venue chosen for the funeral prayers carries its own weight. Aam Khas Bagh is one of Multan’s principal public grounds and has long served as the site for the funerals of the city’s significant public figures, as well as for political gatherings. The choice of a large public ground rather than a mosque courtyard indicates an expectation of substantial attendance from across the political spectrum.
Obituaries of provincial legislators are frequently reduced to a single paragraph, and this newspaper’s practice should be otherwise. Where a figure has served in a provincial cabinet, the record of their portfolio, their constituency and their period of service belongs in the public record, and their family and constituents are entitled to see it set down properly.
We have therefore sought from the PML-N’s Multan organisation the details of Haji Ehsanuddin Qureshi’s terms in the Punjab Assembly, the constituency he represented and the portfolio he held as provincial minister, and will publish a fuller obituary once those particulars are confirmed. Publishing unverified biographical detail about a person who has died is a discourtesy to the family, and we will not do it.
The Lahore Times extends its condolences to the family of Haji Ehsanuddin Qureshi. Funeral prayers: 10am, Tuesday 1 September, Aam Khas Bagh, Multan.
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