As the nation celebrates the 138th anniversary of the birth of Sir Muhammad Iqbal today, it provides a peculiarly appropriate occasion to see how far the nation he conceived actually measures up to his conception. Iqbal may have passed away nearly eight years before Pakistan came into being, but even before that, he laid the groundwork for it. It was perhaps appropriate that the groundwork he carried out was for a political movement, the Pakistan Movement, for while Iqbal was a poet par excellence, he was also a philosopher and an eminently practical politician.
First, in his famous Allahabad Address, he gave shape to the concept of Pakistan as a separate homeland in India for its Muslims. Once conceived, the homeland needed a movement to wrest it from both the British colonialist and the Hindu Congress-ites pressing for a united India. Iqbal provided that movement a leader, in the shape of the Quaid-e-Azam, when he sent Liaquat Ali Khan to bring him back from the UK.
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