This story is from October 10, 2021

Blood ties, little else: Abdul Qadeer Khan’s kin back home in Bhopal

"Blood relation hai. Koun inkaar kar sakta hai?" AQ Khan's cousin, 79-year-old Agha Abdul Jabbar Khan, sighed when TOI called him, stopping short of repeating Harper Lee’s famous lines from 'To Kill a Mockingbird' – 'You can choose your friends, but not your family".
Blood ties, little else: Abdul Qadeer Khan’s kin back home in Bhopal
During his last visit to India in 1972, AQ Khan is said to have told his close acquaintances, "From now on, I will visit you very often, or never." (File photo)
BHOPAL: The name "AQ Khan" weighs like a liability in this narrow bylane, behind a government-school, in Bhopal’s Ginnori locality. It is the ancestral home of Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.
Father of Pakistan's nuclear programme AQ Khan dies at 85
A text message from Holland, around 7am on Sunday, buzzed in this house to tell his relatives he had died in Islamabad just a few minutes earlier.
"Blood relation hai. Koun inkaar kar sakta hai?" AQ Khan's cousin, 79-year-old Agha Abdul Jabbar Khan, sighed when TOI called him, stopping short of repeating Harper Lee’s famous lines from 'To Kill a Mockingbird' – 'You can choose your friends, but not your family".
Various online accounts of Khan leaving right at the time of Partition in 1947 stand corrected.
He left India around 1951-52, after completing his secondary school education, say his Bhopali relatives. AQ’s father, Abdul Ghaffur, refused to follow him. "My father and uncle never went to Pakistan. They were educated people, who understood the call by leaders like Maulana Abul Kalam Azad," said Jabbar.
Jabbar’s father was a graduate and teacher, who retired as a headmaster from Hoshangabad in
Madhya Pradesh with a pension of Rs 79. To put in context, in the 1950s a teacher’s salary was only Rs 45.
It has been 49 years since AQ Khan stepped foot in his ancestral home in Bhopal. He came to Bhopal to pay his respects after the death of Jabbar’s father in 1972. Many did not know about AQ’s Bhopal connect until the scientist's nuclear-proliferation activities became public.
The N-word isn’t uttered in this household. The family does talk about AQ Khan’s love for anything Bhopali – hockey, fishing, kite flying et al. That part of the conversation is jovial. They recall how he would call Bhopal the Switzerland of India. But questions about how a quiet teen from Bhopal turned out to be a nuclear non-proliferation threat are politely off-tracked.
There are no secrets in this home at Ram Phal Wali Gali in Ginnori. It has a mosque minaret looking over the house, like Faisal Mosque in Islamabad, which was a stone’s throw from AQ's detention residence in the Pakistani capital city.
During his last visit to India in 1972, AQ Khan is said to have told his close acquaintances, "From now on, I will visit you very often, or never." For good or bad, the latter turned out to be true.
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