Chaudhry Muhammad Ali

Chaudhri Muhammad Ali (15 July 1905 – 2 December 1982) was a Pakistani civil servant and politician who served as the fourth prime minister of Pakistan, from 12 August 1955 to 12 September 1956. His government promulgated the first Constitution of Pakistan in 1956, transitioning the country from a dominion to a republic. ¹

Muhammad Ali was born at Jalandhar in Punjab into an Arain Punjabi family. He read chemistry at Punjab University, taking his BSc in 1925 and MSc in 1927, lectured briefly at Islamia College, and entered the Indian Civil Service in 1928 through the Audit and Accounts Service. He served as private secretary to Finance Minister James Grigg, was one of the two secretaries of the Partition Council in 1946–1947, and opted for Pakistan at Partition, becoming its first finance secretary. ¹

As federal secretary he helped set up Pakistan's civil bureaucracy and its first federal budgets, earning the description "doyen of the civil bureaucracy". Appointed finance minister in 1951, he was raised to the premiership by Governor-General Iskandar Mirza on 11 August 1955. His government implemented the One Unit scheme and, on 23 March 1956, promulgated the constitution that declared Pakistan an Islamic republic with a parliamentary form of government. A poor party politician, he lost the Muslim League's confidence and resigned in September 1956, succeeded by Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy. ¹

After his resignation he advised the National Bank of Pakistan and withdrew from front-line politics, later joining the Nizam-e-Islam Party. In 1967 he published his memoir-history The Emergence of Pakistan, still a standard insider account of the state's first decade. He died of a cardiac arrest at Karachi on 2 December 1982 and was buried there; Wikidata also carries a conflicting death value of 2 December 1980, which his data record discloses. ^{1 2}