Agha Shaukat Ali (1919 – 19 March 2013) was a civil servant turned politician in the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, British Indian Empire.
[4][5] The family belonged to the military Qizilbash aristocracy which had migrated from Kandahar, Afghanistan in the early 19th century and since then held offices of Royal Physicians, Ministers and Courtiers to the Dogra dynasty.
[1][7] His maternal grandfather, Khan Bahadur Aga Syed Hussain, then Governor and later Home and Judicial Minister in the princely state, was the first matriculate of Kashmir.
Most notably, Shaukat Ali held a public gathering in defiance of prevailing prohibitions at that time, and was imprisoned along with Chaudhry Ghulam Abbas on the orders of the then Prime Minister Ram Chandra Kak, for political reasons from 1947 to 1948.
[citation needed] When Pakistan was founded in 1947, Agha Shaukat's release from prison was brokered by the United Nations.
[citation needed] Shaukat Ali attended the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University as a Fulbright Scholar.
[2][3] He authored the book The Modernization of Soviet Central Asia and was invited by the government of China to share his assessment of the implications of lifting the Red Curtain in 1979.
He founded the Iqbal-Shariati Foundation in Lahore which funded the translation and publication of the works of Muhammad Iqbal and Ali Shariati, two poet-philosophers whom he admired.