Imran Ismail Chohan
When the name Pakistan comes up today, the name that comes with natural reverence is Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah. But decades prior to Jinnah’s political tempest recasting the subcontinent, there was one man in Cambridge busying himself in depositing the ideological seeds of the soon-to-be state. His name was Choudhary Rahmat Ali—the man who not only came up with the term Pakistan but went on to encapsulate its soul. It was on 28 January 1933 that Rahmat Ali published his classic pamphlet “Now or Never: Are We to Live or Perish Forever?”—a document which, in hindsight, is more of a prophetic manifesto than a political tract. In his own words, he penned: At this hallowed moment in Indian history, when British and Indian representatives are framing a Federal Constitution. we submit this appeal. on behalf of our thirty million Muslim fellow-countrymen who inhabit PAKISTAN by which expression we understand the five Northern provinces of India—Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Kashmir, Sind, and Baluchistan. That was the first recorded use of the word Pakistan—not as a slogan, but as a concept of nationhood. It was, in essence, the spiritual birth of Pakistan long before 1947 made it a reality. Rahmat Ali’s argument was built on the principle of distinct Muslim nationhood. He declared that: “India is not the name of one single country; nor the home of one single nation… It includes peoples who have never previously formed part of the Indian nation at any period of its history.” Here, Muslims of north-western India were to him an independent nation—a nation different in religion, culture, and law. He asserted categorically: “Our religion and culture, our history and tradition, our social code and economic system. are fundamentally different from those of most peoples living in the rest of India.” And then the words which now ring as prophecy: “If we, the Muslims of Pakistan. are mistaken into the envisaged Indian Federation. we are diminished to a minority of one in ten. This diminution sounds the death-knell of our nation in Pakistan.” His caution was not metaphorical, but existential. He perceived the mooted All-India Federation as “nothing less than signing the death-warrant of Islam and of Muslims in India.” Coexistence under a Hindu-dominant order, he believed, was political suicide. Rahmat Ali didn’t merely detect danger; he proposed a decisive solution—a “separate Muslim Federation” of the five Muslim-majority provinces. His vision lay well beyond political representation. He envisioned Pakistan as a “bulwark of a buffer state against invasion of India either of ideas or of arms from any quarter”—an independent, sovereign, and morally resilient state based on Islamic principles and self-determination. The last sentence of the pamphlet is still one of the most chilling in South Asian history. He said: “Let us make no mistake about it. The issue is now or never. Either we live or perish for ever. The future is ours if we live up to our faith… We alone can make or mar it.” Those sentences were not only an invitation to action—those were a call to conscience. Eight decades on, they sound like a mirror to Pakistan’s continued missteps on the issues of identity, ideology, and statecraft. Sadly, Rahmat Ali’s dream was half-realized and soon forgotten. The Pakistan that emerged in 1947 was territorially truncated, ideologically diluted, and politically distracted. The founder of the term Pakistan died in exile in Cambridge in 1951—unrecognized, unwelcomed, and unremembered by the very nation he named. But history, as it often does, is reclaiming its forgotten visionary. Rahmat Ali’s call for a morally grounded, ideologically united Pakistan—one that lives “up to its faith” and guards against the “political crucifixion and national annihilation” of its ideals—still resonates today. If his thoughts had been completely realized—if Pakistan had been established according to his blueprint of unity, self-respect, and religion-based rule—then perhaps the crises of direction and division that beset us now could never have emerged. Rahmat Ali’s Now or Never is more than a pamphlet. It is a cry from the past, a warning from history, urging us the very same question he posed in 1933: “Are we to live or perish forever?”