There are many people whom I owe a great deal—my parents, family, teachers, friends and countless others in society who have shaped my values. Yet, if I am asked to name the one man who influenced and nurtured my political beliefs, the answer is unhesitating: Sardar Muhammad Abdul Qayyum Khan, affectionately and historically remembered as Mujahid-e-Awwal—the First Warrior of Kashmir’s freedom struggle. He was not merely a politician; he was a soldier, a strategist, an international-relations thinker and, above all, a man whose foresight often left those around him astonished.

Sardar Abdul Qayyum Khan was born on 4 April 1924 in Ghaziabad, in the Bagh district of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. Coming of age in a turbulent era, he witnessed the twilight of British rule and the explosive birth of the Kashmir dispute. When the people of Poonch rose against the autocratic rule of the Dogra maharaja in 1947, Qayyum Khan was among the first to take up arms. His courage and leadership in those early days earned him the title Mujahid-e-Awwal. He did not fight as a mercenary or a partisan of any narrow faction; he fought because he believed that the people of Jammu and Kashmir had been denied their right to decide their own future. That conviction remained the lodestar of his entire life.

In the decades that followed, he became the most dominant political figure in Azad Jammu and Kashmir. He served multiple terms as President and Prime Minister of the territory, guiding its infant institutions through periods of uncertainty, external pressure and internal discord. Whether in office or in opposition, he never allowed the Kashmir cause to be reduced to a mere slogan. While others were content with emotional rhetoric, Qayyum Khan insisted on understanding the geography of the state, the balance of power in South Asia and the mechanics of international diplomacy.........

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