Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman

Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman (Urdu: چودھری خلیق الزمان‎) (25 December 1889 – 1973) was a Pakistani politician and a very important Muslim figure during British India. He was one of the top leaders of the All India Muslim League. He came from the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh). He was born in Chunar, an ancient town in UP's Mirzapur district. At the time, his father was a naib tehsildar (revenue officer) there.

He was one of the four individuals who addressed the Constituent Assembly in the central hall of Parliament during the moment of Indian independence at midnight of August 14, 1947. The other three were Jawaharlal Nehru, Dr. Rajendra Prasad, Dr. Radhakrishnan.

He succeeded Muhammad Ali Jinnah as president of the Muslim League in 1948. He served as the governor of East Bengal from March 31, 1953, to May 29, 1954. In 1961, he published his memoirs entitled Pathway to Pakistan. The Urdu version of the autobiography came out in 1967. It is entitled Shahrahay Pakistan. In this book, he wrote: "The two-nation theory, which we had used in the fight for Pakistan had created not only bad blood against the Muslims of the minority provinces, but also an ideological wedge between them and the Hindus of India." He further wrote: "He (Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy) doubted the utility of the two-nation theory, which to my mind also had never paid any dividends to us. But after the partition, it proved positively injurious to the Muslims of India, and on a long-view basis for Muslims everywhere." According to him, Jinnah bade farewell to it in his famous speech of August 11, 1947.

Mr. Rafi uz Zaman, a former Pakistani ambassador to Nairobi, is his grandson. Rafi belongs to the 1986 batch of the Foreign Service of Pakistan. He has served abroad in many capitals, including Dhaka and Paris.