Liaquat Ali Khan

Liaquat Ali Khan (1 October 1895 – 16 October 1951) was a Pakistani statesman, the first prime minister of Pakistan from independence until his assassination in 1951, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah's principal deputy in the Muslim League and the Pakistan movement.¹ He is remembered by the titles Quaid-e-Millat and, after his death, Shaheed-e-Millat.²

He was born on 1 October 1895 at Karnal in the Punjab, the second of four sons of the landowner Nawab Rustam Ali Khan.¹ The English article, citing his published correspondence and his biographer Kazmi, records his childhood religious formation: instructed in the Qur'an and hadith at home, he observed the Ramadan fast from the age of four and took part in — and even organised and led — tazia processions during Muharram.¹ That account attests his practice and devotion; it names no school, and no other source names one either.³ He was educated at Aligarh Muslim University and at Oxford, and was called to the bar.²

In 1933 he and his wife Ra'ana persuaded Jinnah in London to return to India and reorganise the Muslim League; in 1936 he became the League's honorary general secretary and its deputy leader in the central assembly.¹ At independence on 15 August 1947 he became Pakistan's first prime minister, holding also the foreign affairs and defence portfolios; his government promulgated the Objectives Resolution of 1949, founded the State Bank and National Bank, and aligned Pakistan with the United States in the opening Cold War.¹

On 16 October 1951 he was shot twice in the chest while addressing a gathering of some 100,000 people at Company Bagh, Rawalpindi; the assassin, Said Akbar Babrak, was killed by police at the scene, and the motive was never established.¹ After his funeral he was buried at Mazar-e-Quaid, Jinnah's mausoleum in Karachi, and the park of his assassination was renamed Liaquat Bagh.¹

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