The Nawab Who Left Everything Behind

Today marks seventy-five years since the afternoon of 16 October 1951, when a bullet in Rawalpindi’s Company Bagh silenced Nawab Zada Liaqat Ali Khan, the first Prime Minister of Pakistan. I confess, with some shame, that I did not remember it. It was a telephone call from my Abba that reminded me, and the reminder carried a gentle rebuke. A nation that forgets the date of its first great grief has begun to forget itself. What did we lose that day? To answer, we must first understand who he was.

Liaqat Ali Khan was born in 1895 into one of the most respected landed families of Karnal. He was educated at Aligarh and Oxford and called to the bar, and he could have lived out his years in comfort on ancestral estates, among orchards and tenants and the deference that old wealth commands. Many of his peers did exactly that. He chose differently. When the Muslim League needed a tireless lieutenant, he became Quaid-e-Azam’s right hand, handling its organization, its finances and its endless correspondence with a loyalty that never asked for credit. When the dream of Pakistan became a country, he crossed the border and left his lands, his houses and his inheritance behind. He filed no extravagant claims in exchange. He asked for no compensation proportionate to his sacrifice. He simply began again, as a citizen of the country he had helped to create. There is an account, handed down through families like mine, of what was discovered when he was struck down. As doctors and attendants tore open his shirt in a desperate attempt to revive him, the vest beneath it was found to be worn through, riddled with holes. Here was the Prime Minister of a new country, a man born to silk and servants, wearing the threadbare undergarment of an ordinary clerk. I have turned that image over in my mind many times today. We have grown used to a kind of nobility that is purchased: the pseudo-Nawab of our own age, who wears his title like cologne and his wealth like a crown, who confuses ancestry with merit and possession with honor. Liaqat Ali Khan was the real thing. He was a Nawab in character, in restraint and in the quiet understanding that true aristocracy is measured by what one is willing to give away. His years in office were brief and difficult. The young state had no capital worth the name, no settled treasury, and millions of refugees arriving with nothing but grief. He helped steer Pakistan through those first fragile years. In March 1949 he placed the Objectives Resolution before the Constituent Assembly, setting down the principle that sovereignty belongs to God alone and that the state would be shaped by the people’s chosen representatives, within democratic and Islamic ideals, with the rights of minorities protected. One may debate how that document was later interpreted, but its author’s intention was a Pakistan anchored in principle rather than appetite. Then came the afternoon in Company Bagh. He rose to address a public gathering and was shot at close range. The assassin was himself killed on the spot, and with him died the easiest path to the truth. Seventy-five years later, the question of who stood behind the gun has never been answered to the nation’s satisfaction. Reports were commissioned, files went missing, and silence settled over the matter. His reported last words were a prayer for Pakistan, asking God to protect the country. Even at the edge of death, he was thinking of the nation and not of himself. I want to speak, too, of the woman he left behind, because her story is the second half of his legacy. Begum Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan was born into a Kumauni Brahmin family, the Pants, who had embraced Christianity before she was born. She studied, taught and worked as an economist before she met the man she would marry. She embraced Islam by her own choice, took the name Ra’ana, and became his partner in every sense. She was the helpmate of a statesman, but she was never merely an ornament to him. When he was gone, she was left a widow with young children and no grand estate to fall back on. Here the dignity of the family reveals itself again. She did not retreat into grievance or wait upon charity. She asked the Government of Pakistan for work, so that she might provide for her children through service rather than sympathy. The state gave her a diplomatic assignment, and she became an ambassador to the Netherlands, then to Italy and other nations, representing Pakistan with grace and intelligence in capitals far from home. Later she served as Governor of Sindh, the first woman to hold that office. She also founded the All-Pakistan Women’s Association, which opened doors of education and livelihood for countless women. A widow’s request for a job became one of the finest chapters of public service in our history. It is a lesson that we, with our appetite for entitlement, might learn from, honor is not a pension demanded but a duty discharged.

This is the household that Pakistan was built by. A husband who gave up his lands, a wife who gave up her old faith and her old life, and both of them gave the country everything while keeping almost nothing. They did not live in marble. They did not leave behind offshore accounts or a dynasty of heirs waiting to inherit power. They left behind a standard, and the standard is the point. And what have we done with it? We have named a few roads and parks after him, and we recite his title, Shaheed-e-Millat, on formal occasions with the dull ease of habit. We have relegated our founders to the pages of textbooks, where they sit pressed flat and unread, safely distant from the demands their lives make upon us. That is the real tragedy. Assassination takes a man once, but forgetting takes him again every year. So let us pause today, if only for a few moments. Whatever our politics, let us lift our hands and pray for Shaheed-e-Millat Liaqat Ali Khan and for his remarkable wife. Let us remember a man who walked away from wealth for the sake of an idea, and was buried with almost nothing but the love of a grieving people. We owe this much to the founding fathers we have so carelessly left behind. And perhaps, in remembering him, we may begin to remember ourselves.