Sheikh Mohammad Rashid

Sheikh Mohammad Rashid, (1915 – 12 September 2002) one of the founding fathers of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) was regarded as an ideologue by thousands of PPP activists and was committed to a socialist cause. He was a founding member of the party's central executive committee and later a member of the first ever PPP cabinet, initially as Health Minister and then Chairman of the Land Reforms Commission. His efforts at land reforms were said to have made him unpopular with many including some of his own land-owning party colleagues because he confiscated, as Federal Land Reforms Commission chairman, thousands of acres of land of big landowners of Pakistan regardless of what political party they belonged to. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto himself was a big landowner in Sindh.

An uncompromising socialist

In the early years of Pakistan, there is an often told story of a debate on the party's drafted charter that Faiz Ahmed Faiz had drafted for the Azad Pakistan Party. Everyone accepted Faiz's draft but Sheikh Rashid. This debate took place among the founders of the party over a word which Sheikh Rashid alone wanted changed. Of course the word was about the distribution of land among the peasants. He debated the rest of the party founders over it for many hours because he wanted it expressed a certain way. All through his political career, he was recognized by his contemporaries as a defender of peasant rights.

Sheikh Mohammad Rashid was ridiculed in the early 1970s for trying to bring a generic drugs scheme to Pakistan.