(Part 7)
Pakistan is a jinx.
Anyone who defends idea of Pakistan eventually dies in pain, in violence, or in both. Those who shielded it, justified it, or invested in it met violent or agonizing fates.
Godfather of Pakistan
Chaudhry Rahmat Ali imagined Pakistan when it did not exist, named it when no one else believed in it, and campaigned for it long before it became a political project. He was the Godfather of idea called Pakistan. In 1933 he published the idea in a pamphlet.
Pakistan’s jinx begins not with Jinnah or Zia, but with the man who coined the very name Pakistan. Yet his life ended in a way that perfectly foreshadowed the fate of every major figure who would later shape this country. He died a lonely death marked by neglect, humiliation, and abandonment.
Rahmat Ali died in Cambridge in 1951, evicted from his rented room over unpaid bills. His belongings like manuscripts, letters, and clothes were thrown out and later auctioned. No Pakistani diplomat came to claim his body. No representative attended his funeral. His grave remained unmarked. The country he named did not repatriate his body, did not honour him, and did not even acknowledge his passing. He had become inconvenient to the narrative he himself had birthed.
A nation born from an idea treated its own ideologue as disposable.
Founders of Pakistan
Nations sometimes betray their ideals. Pakistan betrayed its founders. The tragedy began not decades after creation, but at the moment of birth, when the architecture of the state turned back upon the men who had carried it into existence. Pakistan consumed its own creators one by one.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the first to be consumed. The “Quaid-e-Azam” spent his final hours in a broken-down ambulance on a Karachi roadside. No doctor was available. No medical facility was available. He died not as a head of state, but as a casualty of indifference. The country he forged did not or could not care for him. The moment he ceased to be useful, he also ceased to be protected. His death was the prophecy of time to come.
Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s first prime minister, followed the trajectory with chilling precision. Shot at point-blank range during a public gathering, his assassin was killed immediately by the police. The event was sealed before it could be investigated. A state that cannot protect its first prime minister cannot protect anything except its own opacity. The assassin vanished into silence, and Liaquat followed Jinnah into early death. The country had already begun eating its custodians.
Sikandar Mirza was the President of Pakistan. Yet the system he shaped turned against him with mechanical efficiency. Deposed by General Ayub Khan, stripped of citizenship, and exiled from the very land he had served, Mirza died in England, buried not by a nation but by anonymity. His life traced the arc from authority to irrelevance, a descent that would become the template for Pakistani leaders thereafter. In Pakistan, loyalty expires before the term of office does.
Even the architect who midwifed Partition, Lord Mountbatten, was not spared the violence he had helped unleash at the time of Partition. His police and army ignored the massacre of millions. Decades after he left office, he was killed by a bomb while on a fishing boat off the coast of Ireland. Partition’s wounds travel across borders and through decades. The violence that birthed Pakistan waited, patient and precise, until it found him. It was the long reach of the chaos he once administered. The domino of violence reached Ireland to fall on his boat.
Pakistan not only struggles to protect its founders, it structurally discards them. In states shaped by paranoia and permanent mobilization, even the creators become temporary assets. The moment their utility ends, so does their safety. It cannot reward loyalty because loyalty itself becomes a threat. Those who survived violence, could not survive ignominy.
Trend Continues
By the 1970s, the pattern had matured. Those who tried to steer Pakistan away from the abyss met the same fate as those who created it. Fate did not discriminate between founders, reformers, generals, or civilians. In Pakistan, proximity to power is indistinguishable from proximity to ruin.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was popular and perhaps the only civilian chosen as dictator to rule the country after its partition in 1971. He believed he could control the military he had empowered. He believed charisma could outplay calculation. He believed democratic legitimacy could withstand institutional paranoia. He was wrong on all counts. Bhutto was hanged after a trial so compromised that even his political enemies later called it judicial murder. Pakistan’s system eliminates anyone who tries to redefine it. Bhutto attempted a civilian renaissance but the system responded with a noose.
His daughter, Benazir Bhutto, read the warning in her father’s death but returned to the same arena, convinced history could be bent through resolve. Instead, she too died violently by assassination in Rawalpindi, ironically the same city where her father had been confined. Her death remains unresolved not because evidence was scarce, but because too much evidence threatened the architecture of power. In Pakistan, truth is never found as the facts are buried.
We have discussed the fate of General Zia ul Haq in part 6 of this series of articles.
General Pervez Musharraf escaped the pattern for years, only to face the same end in exile. India warned Pakistan of a likely terror attack on Musharraf in 2004, they received two ‘thank you notes’ in the form of in the form of terror attacks in Mumbai in July 2006 and November 2008. Musharraf was condemned to death by his own judiciary, stripped of legitimacy, and ultimately dying alone in Dubai, Musharraf’s life completed the circle of jinx. It may be of some solace to his family members that his conviction in absentio was later reversed.
Even dictators fleeing the country cannot outrun the curse. Their authority evaporates the moment they step outside the cantonment gates. No nation in modern history has produced such consistent erasure of its own leaders. States may punish traitors. Rivals may fall. But in Pakistan, the system treats every leader, founder, reformer, dictator, or democrat, as temporary ballast. The moment they lose control of the narrative, they lose control of their fate.
Presently the last Prime Minister of Pakistan Imran Khan is languishing in prison. Fate awaits him.
The sequence is too unbroken to be coincidence. It is a structural law. Pakistan is a political black hole. Everything that approaches its center of gravity eventually collapses.
The jinx is not superstition. It is the sum of every structural flaw documented across this series. Pakistan is not cursed by fate. It is cursed by design. And until the design is dismantled, the outcome will not change.
The jinx is now so well known that top echelon of its bureaucracy decide to shift overseas after retirement. More on that in the part 8 of this series.
References:
- Rehmat Ali: https://www.cambridgeindependent.co.uk/news/the-forgotten-man-who-named-pakistan-9227895/
- Musharraf attack: THE UNENDING GAME: A Former R&AW Chief’s Insights into Espionage by Vikram Sood published by Penguin Random House India (2018).