Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman

Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman (25 December 1889 – 18 May 1973) was a Pakistani politician, one of the top leaders of the All-India Muslim League and a founding father of Pakistan.¹ He seconded the Lahore Resolution of March 1940, served as the first president of the Muslim League (Pakistan), governed East Bengal in 1953–1954, and recorded his account of the Pakistan movement in his memoir Pathway to Pakistan.¹

He was born at Chunar, an ancient town in the Mirzapur district of the United Provinces, where his father, Chaudhry Muhammad Zaman, was a revenue officer.¹ His younger brother was Salimuzzaman Siddiqui (1897–1994), the scientist.¹

At the moment of independence on 14 August 1947, Khaliquzzaman was still a Muslim League member of the Constituent Assembly of India, and he was one of the four individuals who addressed that assembly in the central hall of Parliament at the midnight session, alongside Nehru, Rajendra Prasad and Radhakrishnan.¹ He migrated to Pakistan in November 1947, was appointed chief organizer of the Muslim League (Pakistan), and became its first president, serving from 1948 to 1950.¹

He served as governor of East Bengal from 31 March 1953 to May 1954, succeeding Firoz Khan Noon in that office and followed by Iskander Mirza.¹ In 1954 he became Pakistan's ambassador to Indonesia and the Philippines.¹

In 1961 he published his memoirs, Pathway to Pakistan (the Urdu version, Shahrah-e-Pakistan, followed in 1967), which many regard as a rare treasure house of information on the Pakistan movement.¹ In it he argued that the two-nation theory, after partition, had proved injurious to the Muslims left in India, and that Jinnah himself had bid farewell to it in his speech of 11 August 1947.¹

He died on 18 May 1973; Wikidata gives Karachi as the place of his death.² In 1990 Pakistan Post issued a commemorative stamp in his honour in its Pioneers of Freedom series.¹

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