Hassan Nasir

Hassan Nasir (1928 - November 13, 1960) was a Pakistani proletariat leader, Secretary General of the banned Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP) and Office Secretary in the National Awami Party. Hasan Nasir belonged to Hyderabad (Deccan) and had fought, along with Makhdoom Mohiuddin and others, in the Telangana armed struggle. He was a maternal grandson of Nawab Mohsin-ul-Mulk. After the independence of Pakistan in 1947, he migrated to Pakistan and soon became, to the new ruling classes of the country, one of the most feared communists in Pakistan. Thus, despite being the scion of an aristocratic family of Hyderabad, Deccan, he had taken up the cause of the oppressed. He was arrested in 1960, put in a cell in the Lahore Fort and brutally tortured till he died.

He died while under interrogation in Lahore Fort, a detention centre used by the British during The Raj in India. After his murder his mangled body was hastily buried by the police. The reports of torture were frightening and succeeded in halting the protests for several months. There was such a fervor over his martyrdom that the President Ayub Khan government had to exhume his body to try to prove the prosecution point that he had committed suicide and was not killed. The reason was that the government did not want to let remain anything reminding the people of Hassan Nasir. Today, there remains nothing of that cell, where he was killed, except a wall containing a small window.