Khan Amirzadeh Khan

Khan Amirzadeh Khan (15 November 1918 – 13 September 1977) was born at Bakhshali village in Mardan district, the son of Khan Khoidad Khan.¹ He topped his middle and matriculation examinations, graduated from the University of the Punjab, and took his law degree with distinction at Aligarh Muslim University; after an apprenticeship in Karachi under A. K. Brohi he returned to Mardan to practise.¹ The article rests partly on family material and is tagged as an autobiography-based biography; its public facts are used here only where they are corroborated, as noted in its source record.

He was an active member of the Khudai Khidmatgar movement from his student life, and then of the National Awami Party that grew out of it, remaining the party's district president for Mardan until 1972.¹ The article describes that movement as a nationalist, secular and socialist organisation.¹ After the 1958 coup he volunteered, as a junior lawyer, to defend Abdul Ghaffar Khan against the martial-law regime — a defence, the article says, no one else had the courage to undertake.¹ He contested the Nawabzada of Hoti in the 1964 elections and lost narrowly after refusing offers of land and money to withdraw.¹

In the 1970 general elections he won both his National Assembly and Provincial Assembly seats.¹ Under the 1972 Tripartite Agreement between the NAP and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's PPP — negotiations in which he was the NAP's main negotiator — he became the Frontier province's senior minister for law, education and parliamentary affairs.¹ He sat for the NAP on the 25-member constitutional committee of 1972 and delivered, the article records, a speech of five hours and thirty-five minutes on the draft constitution, still the record for an extempore speech in the National Assembly.¹ In the presidential election of 1973 he stood as the combined opposition's unanimous candidate against Fazal Elahi Chaudhry and received 45 votes to Chaudhry's 139.¹

After the assassination of Hayat Sherpao in February 1975, the NAP was banned and its leaders arrested; Amirzadeh Khan was among the accused in the Hyderabad conspiracy tribunal, conducted the party's defence while himself a prisoner, fell ill with diabetes and heart attacks in prison, and was bailed on medical grounds.¹ He died at Mardan in 1977 — the article gives 13 September, Wikidata 9 January, so the date is carried as debated.¹²

The harvest queue that prompted this record carried his name with the years 1890–1950; no source read supports those years for any bearer of the name, and this documented man's biography — a presidential candidacy in 1973 — makes them impossible for him. The record is therefore built under his documented dates, with the queue's figures preserved in the record's provenance rather than carried. No source read names a religion or a school for him, and nothing is inferred from his movement, which the article itself calls secular, or from his party; his faith is recorded as unknown on an absence.¹²