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Journalism of Courage
Muhammad Ali Jinnah is remembered as the founder of Pakistan, its “Qaid e Azam”, or the “Great Leader.” He led a movement that transformed a weak idea of a sovereign Islamic state in British India’s north western provinces into reality, thus shaping the subcontinent’s politics for generations to come. But he was not the first to come up with the idea of Pakistan, nor was he its original champion.
Instead, the man who did, is today relegated to a footnote in the history of the subcontinent.
Choudhary Rehmat Ali can be credited with coining the “term” Pakistan, styling himself as the “Founder of the Pakistan National Movement”. On January 28, 1933, he released a pamphlet titled “Now or Never: Are we to live or perish forever”. In it he made a vehement “appeal on behalf of the thirty million Muslims of PAKISTAN, who live in the five Northern Units of India… for the recognition of their national status, as distinct from the other inhabitants of India, by the grant to Pakistan of a separate Federal Constitution on religious, social and historical grounds.”
According to many historians, this can be seen as the genesis of the very idea of Pakistan; an idea which would become mainstream by the 1940s.
Rehmat Ali’s appeal was as much a scathing critique of “Hindu Nationalism” as it was of the Muslim leaders of the time who he claimed signed the “death-warrant of Islam and of Muslims in India” by agreeing to an All-India Federation in the Round Table Conference. Fearing that the Muslim minority will be subsumed by the Hindu population under the proposed constitution, he advocated for a separate, sovereign entity.
For him, British India was not “the home of one single nation” but rather the “designation of a State created by the British for the first time in history.” Rehmat Ali, thus argued that since the very dawn of history, there already existed various “nations” within what was then India, one of which was “his own.”
This nation that Rehmat Ali called his own was Pakistan, including “five Northern Provinces of India” – Punjab (P), North West Frontier Province or the Afghan Province (A), Kashmir(K), Sindh(S) and Balochistan (tan). He would call its Pakistan. He argued that this region, with its “distinct marks of nationality,” would be “reduced to a minority of one in ten,” in a united Indian federation. Notably, he also said that a creation of Pakistan would be better for all Indians, including Hindus: Rehmat Ali asked, “if it is really desirable to make us sacrifice our nationhood in order to make India one nation?”
Rehmat Ali’s pamphlet did not get much traction. According to his biography by K K Aziz, his idea was seen as “a pipe dream” by eminent Muslim leaders of the time. When he met Jinnah in 1934 and presented him with his ideas, Jinnah’s response was patronising, to say the least. He is supposed to have said, “My dear boy, don’t be in a hurry; let the waters flow and they will find their own level.”
But Ali was undeterred, publishing “Pakistan: The Fatherland of Pak Nation” where he gave his vision even greater clarity and concreteness. Though the book was imaginative, sharing a strained relationship with historical facts, it was a piece that would resonate with many in the years to come – shaping the idea of a nation and its shared history.
Things began to change from 1937 onwards, after Jinnah fell out with the Congress for good. With the leader’s rhetoric turning increasingly separationist, Rahmat Ali’s articulation of Pakistan would find its way into mainstream discourse.
In 1940, at the Muslim League’s Lahore session, the famous Lahore Resolution was passed, advocating that the “geographical contiguous units” in the Muslim-majority areas in India’s “North-Western and Eastern Zones of India, should be grouped to constitute Independent States in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign.” While this resolution did not mention “Pakistan,” Jinnah’s ideas echoed Rahmat Ali’s.
Somewhere between 1940 and 1943, the term “Pakistan” started being used by Jinnah and other Muslim League leaders in their speeches and correspondence. In 1947, Ali’s dream would become a reality.
Rehmat Ali was not a politician. Nor did he stay in the subcontinent for much of the 1930s and 1940s when the struggle for Pakistan was taking shape. His contribution to Pakistan are solely limited to his writings and ideas. Unlike Allama Iqbal, more popularly known as the philosopher behind Pakistan’s creation, Ali’s work remained restricted to a far smaller audience.
But it was important, arguably essential, for Pakistan’s creation. In his work, we see the most radical exposition of the “Two Nation Theory”, later made famous by Jinnah and the Muslim League. We also see a vision for a sovereign nation state that he historicised such that its antecedents could be traced back to the very dawn of history.
Benedict Anderson in his book “Imagined Communities” views a nation as a socially constructed community, imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of a group. Rehmat Ali pioneered the imagining of the “idea of Pakistan.” While many might not remember him in the same vein as Jinnah or Iqbal, it was in his brain that the seeds of Pakistan, as we know it, germinated.
