WEB DESK
Veteran politician and former union minister Qazi Rasheed Masood passed away today. The 73-year-old leader was undergoing treatment in Roorkee, suffering from various ailments. He died around 10 am Monday.
He will be buried at his ancestral village . He was the Health Minister in the National Front government led by VP Singh at the Center in 1989.
He was among the veteran politicians of western Uttar Pradesh. He had been closely associated with VP Singh to Mulayam Singh Yadav in the political journey of five decades. At the same time, in 2012 he also joined the Congress party.
Rasheed Masood had been a member of Parliament for nine times. He was elected to the Rajya Sabha along with the Lok Sabha in his long political career. His death triggered a wave of grief among supporters. Rashid Masood was struggling with many diseases like heart and kidney.
He studied B.Sc and LLM at Aligarh Muslim University. Masood was an agriculturist by profession. He was general secretary of Bharatiya Lok Dal between 1975 and 1977. He was elected to the 6th Lok Sabha for the first time on a Janata Party ticket in the post-emergency polls in 1977. He went on to become the treasurer of the Janata Parliamentary Party between 1979 and 1980.
Masood was re-elected to the 7th Lok Sabha on a Lok Dal ticket in the 1980 polls. After being the chief whip of Lok Dal in 1982, he became the deputy leader of Lok Dal Parliamentary Party for more than a year. He was the member of the Rajya Sabha from 1986 to 89. From 1989 to 91, he was a member of the 9th Lok Sabha. From April to November 1990, he was Minister of Health and Family Welfare (Independent Charge) in the V P Singh government. In 1991 he was re-elected to the 10th Lok Sabha.
In the late eighties, he was associated with Janata Party and was its deputy Parliamentary party leader. In the nineties, he joined the Samajwadi Party. He was the member of the 14th Lok Sabha from 2004 to 2009. In 2010, he was re-elected to the Rajya Sabha. On 12 December 2011 he resigned from rajya sabha(Upper House) and from the Samajwadi Party and joined INC. He was elected as the special member of CWC (Congress Working Committee). He became the chairman of APEDA on 4 April 2013 for a term of 3 year.