There is no available record, however, of the original version of the song. Paracha’s article also links to a 2011 version of this song from Radio Pakistan’s YouTube page. This controversy was flamed in 2004 by Pakistani bloggers. Nadeem Farooq Paracha, the Pakistani cultural critic and pop historian writes in his piece for The Express Tribune (published August 14, 2017) that the first Pakistani national anthem was written by Jagannath Azad, a Hindu poet, and aired on the midnight of August 14th 1947. While it is hard to deny the thrill in the symbolism of a Hindu writing the Islamic nation’s national anthem, the truth can sometimes be less exciting. This offer was taken up by the government and in June 1948 announced to the nation through government press ads. 5000 each for the people who would compose and write Pakistan’s national anthem. Had he meant Azad’s song to be the official anthem, as the Governor General of Pakistan he could have intervened when in early 1948 a Muslim South African A R Ghani offered prizes of Rs. The truth is that the large-scale search for Pakistan’s national anthem started while Jinnah was still alive. Paracha claims that Azad’s anthem ‘stopped being aired by Radio Pakistan after Jinnah’s demise in September 1948’, making it sound like a deliberate conspiracy.
Nadeem Farooq Paracha, the Pakistani cultural critic and pop historian writes in his piece for The Express Tribune (published August 14, 2017) that the first Pakistani national anthem was written by Jagannath Azad, a Hindu poet, and aired on the midnight of August 14 th 1947. Since its inception, the Pakistani national song has thus existed as an effort at reconciling these contradictory forces. Instead of encouraging ‘unity in diversity’, something the Indian state learnt relatively quickly under the tutelage of its Prime Minister Nehru, Pakistan had a hard time justifying its existence without privileging a globalized Islamic identity over local histories and cultures. The Pakistani project is the attempted homogeneity of a diverse set of ethnicities and cultures under the umbrella of Islam, with the aid of Urdu, to glue together a motley of Bengalis, Pashtuns, Baloch, Punjabis, Sindhis and Urdu-speaking Muhajirs.