Newly-elected Pakistan President Dr Arif Alvi has an interesting connection with India. His father Dr Habib-ur-Rehman Elahi Alvi was a dentist to India's former Prime Minister Jawahar Lal Nehru before partition.
This revelation came from a short biography of the new President on the website of his party Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI). Alvi, who was elected as the 13th President of Pakistan on Tuesday, is a close ally of Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan and one of the founding members of the PTI Party.
In a three-way contest, the 69-year-old former dentist defeated Peoples Party candidate Aitzaz Ahsan and the Pakistan Muslim League-N nominee Maulana Fazl ur Rehman.
He is the third president, whose family had migrated to Pakistan from India after the partition. His predecessors Mamnoon Hussain's and Pervez Musharraf's families also came from Agra and Delhi, respectively. According to the website, the family possesses letters written by Nehru to Dr Elahi Alvi.
The president's full name is Dr Arif-ur-Rehman Alvi and he was born in 1947 in Karachi. His father settled after migrating from India and opened a dental practice in Saddar area of the city. The senior Alvi was also connected to the Jinnah family and was made a trustee of a trust established by Muhammad Ali Jinnah's sister Shirin Bai Jinnah.
Alvi started his political career five decades ago when he was studying at De'Montmorency College of Dentistry. He was a member of the students' wing of Jammat-i-Islami. During one of the protests against the military rule of the president Ayub Khan on Mall Road in Lahore, he was shot in his right arm.
He contested elections on Jammat-i-Islami ticket in 1979 but had lost. In 1996, he became one of the founding members of the PTI party and helped in writing the constitution of the party.
Though he lost his first election for PTI in 1997, he steadily rose through the ranks and held the post of secretary-general from 2006 till 2013, when he was elected as the member of the National Assembly. He was re-elected in 2018.
