"I can't imagine what sort of reception my husband will get in your country," said Liaquat Ali Khan's wife last week. "Americans will probably think he is Rita Hayworth's brother-in-law or perhaps a distant cousin of the Shah of Iran." Liaquat Ali Khan, the 54-year-old Prime Minister of Pakistan, due to arrive in Washington this week, is not related to any Oriental potentates, but his power and influence are far greater than those of any princeling in the Islamic world.
While Mohamed Ali Jinnah performed the pyrotechnics which achieved the separation of Pakistan as a state in the 1947 partition of India, Lawyer Liaquat did the hard behind-the-scenes work in the Moslem League. With Jinnah's death, Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan inherited his power.
Two Tickets. Like his leader Jinnah, and his rival Nehru, Liaquat is part Westerner, part Oriental. He is Oxford-educated. Except for his Persian lamb cap, he usually dresses in Western garb, wears loud Broadway ties. But there is in Liaquat none of the East-West conflict which has characterized Jinnah and Nehru; the tensions of the struggle to make a new nation have left no mark on him. Liaqyat is calmly determined to mingle in Pakistan the best of East and West. Says he: "The East has no tradition of democracy. It is our duty to build one up."
A chain-smoker, Liaquat takes an occasional gimlet (gin and lime), likes to repair radios and cigarette lighters, and sometimes beats a hot drum at parties. He also likes to sing the songs of Iqbal, a great Urdu poet, accompanying himself on the harmonium.
The Begum Liaquat Ali Khan, the Prime Minister's black-haired, bouncy wife, is the daughter of a Hindu Brahman turned Christian. She herself became a devout Moslem. To free Moslem women from purdah, she organized the white-pajamaed, pigtailed Pakistan Women's National Guard. "See these women?" she says, "they were in purdah once. Do you see any purdah now?" Married 17 years, Liaquat and the Begum have two sons, Ashraf, 12, and Akbar, 9, both aspiring musicians.
Liaquat is fond of saying that he came to Karachi as a refugee, just like 6,000,000 other citizens of the new state. Behind him in India he left extensive real estate, was amused recently to receive a notice from India's internal revenue department reminding him to pay his taxes on it.
The average Pakistani finds nothing amusing about India. Almost everything in Pakistan life is powerfully influenced by fear and hatred of India. When Nehru was the lion of the Commonwealth Prime Ministers Conference last spring, Pakistanis got the idea that Britain favored India, retaliated by the obvious gesture of wooing Soviet Russia. They welcomed Russian trade and cultural delegations, maneuvered an invitation for Liaquat to visit Moscow. Since the U.S. invitation to Liaquat, there has been little talk of Russia or the Moscow trip, and Liaquat insists that Pakistanis are the world's most unbending antiCommunists.