Rahmat Ali’s
Impossible Dream
By Sir Cam
Cambridge, UK
When Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad
Ali Jinnah bid farewell to Delhi and arrived in
Karachi on August 7, 1947, he confessed to his
ADC, “Do you know, I never expected to see
Pakistan in my lifetime.” Pakistan was a
dream — a Cambridge student’s dream
at that. When the idea was first proposed it was
labeled “chimerical and impracticable”.
Student follies, however, have a habit of sometimes
becoming reality. Pakistan was one “student’s
scheme”.
Choudhary Rahmat Ali, a Cambridge University law
student, initiated the movement for Pakistan by
issuing the pamphlet Now or Never, or the Pakistan
Declaration, on January 28, 1933 from 3 Humberstone
Road, Cambridge. To make the claim more representative
he had the document signed by three other students,
none of whom was at Cambridge.
Calling Rahmat Ali “a historical figure
and a seminal thinker”, Pakistan’s
eminent historian KK Aziz acknowledges in Rahmat
Ali: A Biography: “He was the first to think
of a sovereign status for the Muslims of India,
to prepare a well-defined plan for this, to organise
a movement for advancing the cause, and to mount
a proper campaign for preaching to the unconverted.”
And in addition he also came up with the anagram
“Pakistan”. Jinnah’s biographer,
Stanley Wolpert, has written that Rahmat Ali issued
a “massive quantity of strange religio-political
pamphlets and letters.”
According to Aziz Beg, another biographer of Jinnah,
Rahmat Ali’s ideas stirred the young and
inspired the “growth of Muslim political
consciousness throughout India”. Wolpert
says that Jinnah chose to ignore Rahmat Ali, but
“He (Jinnah) would not, however, be able
much longer to ignore the political demand of
Rahmat Ali’s obviously well-funded movement
sponsored from the heart of Cambridge.”
Both Jinnah and Rahmat Ali arrived in the UK in
November 1930. Jinnah, the brilliant lawyer from
Bombay, soon bought a house in Hampstead and pursued
his legal career and attempted, without much luck,
to enter parliament. The young Rahmat Ali went
to Cambridge and commenced his bar-at-law in London.
In 1933, when ‘Now or Never’ was issued,
Jinnah was aged 57, while Rahmat Ali was 36.
Jinnah had become disillusioned and had lost hope
for India when Rahmat Ali started his youthful
agitation for Pakistan. When Rahmat Ali discussed
the Pakistan idea with Jinnah in the spring of
1933, Jinnah called it an “impossible dream”.
When things didn’t work out as he expected
in London or perhaps he simply got bored leading
the life of an English gentleman, Jinnah returned
to India in 1934 to take up the leadership of
the All-India Muslim League.
By 1940 the League had got nearer to the Pakistan
idea by adopting the famous Lahore Resolution.
However, it did not mention the word Pakistan.
Jinnah himself did not use the word Pakistan until
the early 1940s. Once Jinnah took up a case, it
was a certainty that he’d win. As far as
Pakistan was concerned, Jinnah was a late starter.
But once the single-minded barrister had picked
up the Pakistan file, it was only a matter of
time before the country would be established.
August 14, 1947 came soon enough.
For Jinnah it was a case of “Better a moth-eaten
Pakistan than no Pakistan”. Rahmat Ali,
the visionary, found this difficult to accept.
Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre write in
Freedom at Midnight, “The man who had first
articulated the impossible dream of Pakistan spent
the day of 14 August alone in his cottage at 3
Humberstone Road [he was actually there only as
a student in the academic year 1932/33]... His
dream belonged to another man now, the man who
scorned it when Rahmat Ali had first begged him
to become its champion.”
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