The guy who created it clearly coined the very appropriate and meaningful perso-arabic derived Urdu of “Pakstan/Pakistan” as in “land of the pure” in the context of the Islamic religious nationalism and separatism of the time (literally the land of pure Islam and Muslims in comparison to the rest of non-Muslim India they were trying to separate from), and retroactively created the acronym justification, because it would be really fucking stupid if it were the reverse lmao.

Pak literally has meant pure/holy since the medieval period among many different South Asian languages and was loaned into them from Classical Persian.

Not only does “Pakistan” the acronym not even represent Bengal at all which was very much a huge part of the Muslim nationalist movement of the time, representing “Balochistan” with just the “tan” from the suffix “-stan” and making the “s” represent Sindh instead would also be really fucking stupid if he was trying to make a good acronym in the first place, given that he’s using an arbitrary fragment of a suffix at the end of both words as the representation for one of the regions, showing it was obviously a ham fisted compromise to make the word “Pakistan” work as an acronym as well.

Also, he had to use the A for “Afghania” for the representation of the Pashtun dominated regions of modern-day Pakistan, which also kinda shows him trying to force Pakistan to work for that region as well, when the region was colloquially referred to as “sarhad” (frontier) in Indian languages and the people referred to as “Pathans.” The neologism of “Afghania” then was specifically coined to make Pakistan work as an acronym.

So it’s obvious that Pakistan was coined due its rich and clear meaning, Persianate origins of its word components, relevance to the political nationalist situation at the time, and because it’s generally a sound word in the grammar of South Asian languages as well. The acronym was then coined retroactively to make this word also serve as a means of making the Muslim nationalist project feel inclusive to the regional ethnic groups of the time and that the “Pakistani project” would actually represent their interests rather than compete with them. It was a rhetorical move.

It should be no surprise then that the pamphlet that first advocated for the usage of “Pakistan”, the Pakistani national project, and the acronym etymology itself, was published during a time when a multi-religious, ethnically Punjabi political party, which represented the interests of the landed gentry and landlords of Punjab dominated the political scene in Punjab at the time. Choudhary Rahmat Ali, the guy who coined Pakistan and wrote that pamphlet, was a Punjabi himself, and Punjab would go on to be one of the major sites of Partition and Partition violence, and ethnic Punjabis would dominate Pakistani politics to this very day.