Ali Malik's blog

August 11, 1947 Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen!I cordially thank you, with the utmost sincerity, for the honor you have conferred upon me – the greatest honor that is possible for this Sovereign Assembly to confer – by electing me as your first President. I also thank those leaders who have spoken in appreciation of my services and their personal references to me. I sincerely hope that with your support and your co-operation we shall make this Constituent Assembly an example to the world. The Constituent Assembly has got two main functions to perform. The first is the very onerous and responsible task of framing our future constitution of Pakistan and the second or functioning as a full and complete sovereign body as the Federal Legislature of Pakistan. We have to do the best we can in adopting a provisional constitution for the Federal Legislature of Pakistan. You know really that not only we ourselves are wondering but, I think, the whole world is wondering at this unprecedented...

Recent controversy over the remarks of L.K. Advani about Quaid-e-Azam has started a debate in the IndoPak politics that if initiated some 70-80 years back could have avoided the partition. There were two main parties in the freedom struggle of India, the Congress and the Jinnah. Then there were some small but significant players; the Mahasabahis, Sikhs, Muslim religious right, and communists. All of them were aligned with Congress, so invariably the politics of pre-independence era was a clash between Jinnah and the rest of them (I don't consider Muslim League to be an entity because it's entire worth was because of Jinnah and Jinnah alone and couldn't have survived with out him). The freedom movement led to partition and the partition led to the worst bloodshed of recorded human history. So bitterness remains over who was responsible for this dilemma. India under Nehru professes a secular state, that coupled with the fact the Pakistan soon after Jinnah fell into the hands ...