Ibrahim Ismail Chundrigar

Ibrahim Ismail Chundrigar (1897–1960) was a Pakistani lawyer and politician who served as prime minister of Pakistan from 17 October to 11 December 1957, the shortest premiership of the country's parliamentary era, at the head of a coalition formed after Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy's resignation. ^{1 2}

Chundrigar was born on 15 September 1897 at Godhra in the Bombay Presidency — Banglapedia's entry instead gives 15 April 1898 at Ahmedabad, a wholly different tradition for the same man's life that this museum discloses rather than suppresses. A Bombay lawyer, he rose in the provincial Muslim League, sat in the Bombay Legislative Assembly from 1937, and held the commerce portfolio in the interim government of India. ^{1 2}

In independent Pakistan he was trade minister in the first cabinet of 1947, then ambassador to Afghanistan, governor of the North-West Frontier Province, governor of West Punjab, and law minister. His own record of Feroz Khan Noon's premiership names Chundrigar as the man Noon succeeded in the law-and-parliamentary-affairs side of the 1957 changes. ¹

Appointed by President Iskander Mirza in October 1957, his coalition of the Muslim League, Republican Party, Krishak Sramik Party and Nizam-e-Islam Party unravelled within weeks, and he resigned after fifty-five days, the premiership passing to Feroz Khan Noon. He died of a haemorrhage at the Royal Northern Hospital in London on 26 September 1960; his body was flown home and buried in the Society Graveyard at Karachi. Banglapedia's tradition gives his death year as 1968 instead, and that variant is preserved in his data record. ^{1 2}