‘Dushmani jam kar karo lekin…’ : Bashir Badr, poet who modernised the Urdu ghazal, passes away at 91 | Books and Literature News
4 min readUpdated: May 28, 2026 10:42 PM IST In July 1972, when former Pakistan Prime Minister Zulfeqar Ali Bhutto came to India to sign the landmark Simla Agreement on bilateral relations between India and Pakistan, he reached for an Urdu couplet to capture the moment. The couplet, he chose—Dushmani jam kar karo lekin ye gunjaaish rahe, jab kabhi hum dost hojaayein to sharmindah na hon (Perform your duty as the enemy wholeheartedly, but make sure that if we ever become friends, we are not embarrassed)–had been written by the poet Bashir Badr, who passed away at his home in Bhopal on Thursday. He was 91. Born in the winter of 1935 in Ayodhya, which was then part of the United Province in British India, to a civil servant father and “pious” mother, Bashir was a prodigious child. He composed his first couplet when he was just seven, reciting his first ghazal before an audience in 1946 in the city of Etawah, where he was given the title, Badr, meaning the moon, which he chose …
