Last week, an important date in our history went by quietly and unnoticed as it does every year as far as I can remember. On 28 January 1933, Chaudhry Rahmat Ali — a 33-year-old student at Cambridge University — published a declaration, which was to forever change the landscape of South Asia. Ali’s own story is quite remarkable given just how unremarkable his beginnings were. Hailing from a small village called Balachaur, now in India, this son of a Punjabi farmer traversed an interesting path for himself that saw him go to Jalandhar, then Lahore and finally to Cambridge, which remains his final resting place. Reading historian KK Aziz’s biography of Ali makes one struck with the passionate zeal and unwavering sense of a mission that burned through him. The source of this boundless zeal was otherworldly but not irrational. Though a practicing Muslim who prayed five times day, one cannot write him off as a fundamentalist because everything about him was essentially modern, especially his pursuit of education at Cambridge; his love for English law (he was called to bar at Middle Temple Inn at the relatively old age of 46, seven, eight years before his death), and his adoption of the English language as his main tool of dissemination of ideas. He was not your latter day radicalised Muslim who hated the West but was at home there despite having come from an entirely alien culture. His declaration was “Pakstan” (originally spelt without an ‘i’) or Pakistan, which he declared was the only way that 30 million Muslims living in the North-West of the subcontinent could progress. Later, he attempted to widen the scope; including Bengal and Assam and subsequently coming up with 10 different “countries” for Muslims and Hindus in India, which he called “Dinia”. None of this was based on any hatred for the Hindus even though he was a critic of the Hindu caste system but rather the idea of the right of self-determination, which was in vogue with President Woodrow Wilson’s famous 14 points. Ali argued that Muslims of India formed a distinct nation, which should have the right of self-determination for not just one but several homelands; including Pakistan, “Bang-e-Islam” (Bengal and Assam), “Faruqistan”, “Muinistan”, “Siddiqistan”, “Osmanistan” and so on and so forth. Equally, he wanted Sikhs to have their homeland called “Sikhia”; untouchables to have their homeland called “Akhootistan”; caste Hindus to have “Hindoostan”. He even imagined a homeland for Anglo-Indians and Europeans in the subcontinent. After Pakistan was created, however, Ali became furious with Jinnah for not having pushed for his “Pak-Plan” in entirety, calling him Quisling-e-Azam for having betrayed the Muslims of India. The political idealist had no time for the realities of politics. Nevertheless, Jinnah — who had rubbished the idea of Pakistan as being impractical and fundamentally against his Indian nationalist creed in 1933 — owed a great deal to Ali’s formulation of the Pakistan demand. Many of the arguments, including the two-nation theory, which Jinnah was to repeat after 1940, had originally been put forward by Rahmat Ali himself. Till 1939, at least Jinnah remained unconvinced by the merits of these arguments, refusing even to use the name Pakistan till it was ultimately “fathered upon us by the Hindu press”. It is unclear how far Jinnah was convinced even after 1940 and that is why we have an unending debate about whether Jinnah was using the Pakistan demand and the two nation theory as a bargaining counter for a bigger share of sovereignty at an all India centre. Certainly after Pakistan was created, Jinnah reverted to using the term “minority” instead of “nation”, most notably but not exclusively in his 11 August 1947 speech, where he hoped that “in due course of time, Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to be Muslims, not in a religious sense for that is the personal faith of an individual, but in a political sense.” In contrast, for Ali, Muslims were a nation eternally bound together by the bonds of faith and a common history and experience and not a tactical argument. Pakistan and other Muslim homelands were to be the fulfilment of their desire for sovereignty and the right to live as free people, living side by side Hindu Sikh and other homelands, coming together in one cultural universe which he curiously named Pakasia. This is what Pakistan meant to Ali. It was a fantasy, to say the least, but not borne out of ill will or malice as Hindus denounced it. The “Pak-Plan” that Ali had envisaged for the whole of South Asia was unrealistic from the start. It was preposterous to imagine that a Hindu majority in the subcontinent would willingly agree to a redistribution of India, which would confine them to a few homelands, no matter how fair it might have seemed to the minorities. All the same, Muslim majority provinces were not ready to submit to a strong centre dominated by the Hindu majority and Hindu provinces though they would have agreed to a looser federation. The Cabinet Mission Plan was the only solution that was put forward which could keep India united but that was torpedoed by the Congress, precisely because it did not give it the kind of central control it had been working towards. The consequence of this was Pakistan. The question before us today, as Pakistanis, is not what Pakistan meant to Ali or any of the other dreamers who came up with the idea but rather what Pakistan means to us, as modern day Pakistanis. To me, Pakistan means an opportunity for the Muslims to show the world that they can fashion a modern democratic state, which despite being justifiably proud of its Islamic heritage does not discriminate against religious minorities or women or any section of its citizenry. It can be a model to show the world that a civic Islam can peacefully coexist with modernity and democracy and can even be a positive force in national development. Our treatment of minorities has been abysmal so far but let us hope that we grab this opportunity and make something of this unprecedented experiment in human history born out of the fertile imagination of a Cambridge undergraduate. There is still time, but, first, you must decide what Pakistan means to you. The writer is a practising lawyer. He blogs at hhtp://globallegalforum.blogspot.com and his twitter handle is @therealylh