Sir Feroz Khan Noon

Sir Malik Feroz Khan Noon was a Punjabi landowner and politician who moved from the cross-communal Unionist Party to the Muslim League in late 1945 and later became the seventh Prime Minister of Pakistan. He was born on 7 May 1893 at Hamoka in Khushab district and died in December 1970 at Nurpur Noon (the infobox of one source gives 9 December, its text 7 December). He studied at Aitchison College, Lahore, and Wadham College, Oxford, and was called to the bar at the Inner Temple. In the Punjab story he stands for the Muslim League's capture of Punjabi Muslim politics in 1945 and 1946 and the weakening of the Unionist accommodation before Partition.

Key moments

• 1927 to 1936: Punjab minister for Local Government, then Education, in the Unionist ministries.
• 1936 to 1941: High Commissioner of India in London.
• 1941 to 1945: member of the Viceroy's Executive Council, first for Labour, then from 1942 for Defence.
• Late 1945: leaves the Unionist Party and joins the All-India Muslim League.
• 2 March 1947: the coalition of Khizr Hayat Tiwana with the Congress and Akali Dal, formed after the 1946 election, ends when Tiwana resigns as Premier.
• 1950 to 1953: Governor of East Bengal. 1953 to 1955: Chief Minister of Punjab in Pakistan.
• 16 December 1957: elected Prime Minister of Pakistan. He negotiated the transfer of Gwadar from Oman, which joined Pakistan on 8 September 1958.
• 7 and 8 October 1958: removed when President Iskander Mirza imposed martial law and Ayub Khan took power.

A statement Sikh sources cite

A 1950 publication of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, S.G.S. Talib's Muslim League Attack on Sikhs and Hindus in the Punjab, 1947, quotes Noon as saying that if Muslims had to fight Britain to avoid being placed under one central Hindu Raj, the havoc they would wreak would put to shame what Jenghez and Halaku Khan did. The source given for this quotation is a Wikiquote page citing page 34 of Talib's book. It gives no date or place, so the wording and context are not independently confirmed.

His autobiography is From Memory (1966). He is remembered as one of the Unionist grandees whose move to the League coincided with the end of the cross-communal politics of old Punjab.