Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy (8 September 18925 December 1963) was a Pakistani politician and statesman who served as the fifth prime minister of Pakistan from 1956 to 1957 and before that as the prime minister of Bengal from 1946 to 1947. He is regarded as a patron of a Two-Nation Theory for the creation of Pakistan, for which he is revered as one of the leading founding member of Pakistan; and also as the pioneer of the Bengali civil rights movement in Bangladesh. Also he was the political mentor of Bangladesh's founding president, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
Born in 1892 at Midnapore, Bengal, Suhrawardy was a scion of one of Bengal's most prominent Muslim families, the Suhrawardys. He studied law at the University of Oxford, and joined the independence movement during the 1920s as a trade union leader in Calcutta, initially associated with the Swaraj Party. He joined the All-India Muslim League and became one of the leaders of its Bengal branch. Suhrawardy was elected to the Bengal Legislative Assembly in 1937 and led the Muslim League to decisively win the 1946 provincial general election in Bengal, serving as the last prime minister of Bengal until the partition of India. His premiership was notable for his proposal to create a separate and united Bengal — supported by the Muslim League but opposed by the Indian National Congress — and failing to prevent the Great Calcutta Killings. In 1947, the Bengal Assembly voted to partition the province. Suhrawardy briefly remained in India after partition to attend to his ailing father and manage his family's property. He eventually moved to Pakistan and divided his time between Karachi (Pakistan's federal capital) and Dhaka (capital of East Pakistan).
In Dhaka, Suhrawardy emerged as the leader of the Bengali-dominated Awami League which became the principal opposition party to the Pakistan Muslim League. In 1956, the Awami League formed a coalition government with the Republican Party to unseat the Muslim League. Suhrawardy became prime minister in the coalition government, forging stronger ties with the United States by leading Pakistan's diplomacy in SEATO and CENTO. He also became the first Pakistani premier to travel to Communist China. His pro-US foreign policy caused a split in the Awami League in East Pakistan, with Maulana Bhashani forming the break-away pro-Maoist National Awami Party. Suhrawardy's premiership lasted for a year. His central cabinet included figures like Feroz Khan Noon as foreign minister and Abul Mansur Ahmad as trade minister. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was considered Suhrawardy's chief political protégé.
Suhrawardy was premier under Pakistan's first republican constitution. The Noakhali riots also saw the genocide of Bengali Hindus during which Suhrawardy tried to keep the news of the atrocities from the media and for either planning the massacre or failing to take action to stop it. During the 1958 military coup, Suhrawardy was arrested by the military government, due to which he missed the wedding of his niece, Salma Sobhan, Pakistan's first woman barrister. He founded the National Democratic Front in 1962 as a political alliance to oppose the military regime of Ayub Khan but died one year later in Beirut due to a heart attack. After his death, the Awami League veered towards Bengali nationalism and launched the 6-point movement, ultimately leading to a civil war in East Pakistan and secession of Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971.
Suhrawardy is also remembered for his role as the minister for civil supply during the Bengal famine of 1943. Pro-congress and Hindutva-aligned rightwing sources and media consider him the mastermind behind the Direct Action Day; directly responsible for the 1946 Calcutta killings, which is not independently established by neutral historians. Suhrawardy's only daughter Begum Akhtar Sulaiman was a social worker and activist in Pakistan; his son, Rashid Suhrawardy, from his second marriage to Vera Alexandrovna Tiscenko Calder, was a British actor known for his role in the film Jinnah. His brother Hasan Shaheed Suhrawardy was a diplomat, writer and art-critic. Many places in South Asia bear his name, including an avenue in Islamabad, a large park near his mausoleum in Dhaka, and streets, dormitories and memorials across Bangladesh. The Suhrawardy family home in Kolkata has been leased as a library and information centre to the Bangladesh High Commission in India by the city's waqf board.
Family and early life
The Suhrawardy family are regarded as one of the illustrious families of the Indian subcontinent. Claiming themselves as descendants of the first caliph of Islam, the Suhrawardy lineage is traced to Shihab al-Din 'Umar al-Suhrawardi, a Sufi who lived in Baghdad during the 12th century. The Suhrawardiyya order is one of the major Sunni orders of Sufism. His grandfather, Ubaidullah Al-Ubaidi Suhrawardy, was a Dhaka-based Sufi leader of the Bengali Renaissance and is buried beside Lalbagh Fort. His father Justice Sir Zahid Suhrawardy was a judge of the Calcutta High Court. His brother Hasan Shaheed Suhrawardy was a linguist, poet, art-critic and diplomat. His uncles included Lieutenant Colonel Hassan Suhrawardy and Sir Abdullah Al-Mamun Suhrawardy. His cousin Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah was one of South Asia's pioneering women in public service. His first wife was Begum Niaz Fatima, the daughter of Justice Sir Abdur Rahim, a member of the Governor's Executive Council and Speaker of the Central Legislative Assembly. Begum Niaz Fatima died in 1922. His second wife was Begum Vera Suhrawardy, a Russian actress of Polish descent.
A young Huseyn studied in Calcutta Madrasa and attended St. Xavier's College, Kolkata where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree. Both Huseyn and his elder brother Hasan studied in St Catherine's College, Oxford. They entertained themselves with D. H. Lawrence, Robert Trevelyn, Bertrand Russell, Hugh Kingsmill, Basanta Kumar Mullick, Kiran Shankar Roy, Apurba Chanda, Sri Prakash, S K Gupta, Surendra Kumar Sen, and Syud Hossain. The elder Suhrawardy (Hasan) was in Oxford when Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore became the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize in 1913. His brother Hasan later recounted that "it is difficult now for me to recapture the elation and the ecstasy of those days, but I remember distinctly that look of awe which was in my landlady's eyes when she brought in the breakfast with the morning newspaper containing the scoop". Suhrawardy obtained further degrees, including a Bachelor of Civil Law from Oxford and a Master of Arts in Arabic from Calcutta. Suhrawardy became a barrister. He was called to the Bar of England and Wales through Gray's Inn in 1922–23.
His first son Shahab died of pneumonia. His second son Rashid Suhrawardy was a British theatre actor. Rashid starred in the film Jinnah along with Christopher Lee. His granddaughter Shahida Jamil served as Pakistan's law minister. His nieces include Princess Sarvath al-Hassan of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan; the late Bangladeshi barrister Salma Sobhan; and the film-maker Naz Ikramullah.
Early political career (1924-1937)
Political organizer Suhrawardy was credited as a pioneering modern political organizer in Bengal. He created 36 trade unions among sailors, railway employees, jute and cotton mills workers, rickshaw pullers, cart drivers and other working class groups dominated by Bengali Muslims.
Deputy Mayor of Calcutta (1924-1926) Suhrawardy joined the Swaraj Party led by Bengali Hindu secularist C. R. Das in 1923. He became the Deputy Mayor of Calcutta in 1924. After the death of Das, Suhrawardy turned to Indian Muslim nationalism. He emerged as a leader of the Bengal Provincial Muslim League (BPML), the provincial wing of the Muslim League which his father Zahid had earlier helped create in 1912.
Bengali Muslim groups Suhrawardy formed several Bengali Muslim political groups, including the Calcutta Khilafat Committee during the 1920s amid the dissolution of the Ottoman caliphate and the Turkish War of Independence; the Bengal Muslim Election Board; the United Muslim Party; and the Independent Muslim Party.
Bengal Legislative Assembly and WWII (1937-1945) In 1937, Suhrawardy was elected to the newly formed Bengal Legislative Assembly. He was appointed Minister of Commerce and Labor in the cabinet of the 1st Prime Minister of Bengal A. K. Fazlul Huq. In 1940, the Lahore Resolution was adopted by Indian Muslim leaders calling for the creation of independent states in eastern and northwestern India; it was unclear if the resolution implied a single state covering the two Muslim-majority regions of India or multiple states. Suhrawardy served as Minister of Civil Supplies in the cabinet of the 2nd prime minister of Bengal Sir Khawaja Nazimuddin. According to author Thomas Keneally, Suhrawardy blamed black marketers and the central government in New Delhi for the Bengal famine of 1943 during World War II, and claimed he worked tirelessly on relief. Viceroy Lord Wavell, however, believed that Suhrawardy was corrupt, that he "siphoned money from every project that was undertaken to ease the famine, and awarded to his associates contracts for warehousing, the sale of grain to governments, and transportation." On the other hand, Indian author, Madhushree Mukherjee, laid major responsibility of this famine to British prime minister Winston Churchill who wanted the ration for war efforts only and had refrained the U.S. aid to Bengal. Suhrawardy was further accused of practising a Scorched-Earth Policy to counter the Japanese Army's advances in the East and supervised to burn thousand fishing boats to block any potential movement of invading Japanese Army troops. These measures aggravated starvation and famine and the relief was only ordered when Lord Wavell became the Viceroy, using the Indian Army to organise relief. However, by that time, the winter crop had arrived and famine conditions had already eased, after millions had earlier perished. Calcutta's Hindu-owned newspapers had become very critical of his role and the Bengali Hindus held him directly responsible for the famine.
Prime Minister of Bengal (1946-1947)
During the 1946 general election, Suhrawardy led the Bengal Provincial Muslim League (BPML) to a decisive victory. The Muslim League's biggest success was in Bengal where out of 119 seats for Muslims, the BPML won 113. Suhrawardy was supported by the League's chief Muhammad Ali Jinnah to assume the premiership of Bengal. Suhrawardy's cabinet included himself as home minister; Mohammad Ali of Bogra as finance, health and local government minister; Syed Muazzemuddin Hossain as education minister; Ahmed Hossain as agriculture, forest and fisheries minister; Nagendra Nath Roy as judicial and legislative minister; Abul Fazal Muhammad Abdur Rahman as cooperatives and irrigation Minister; Abul Gofran as civil supplies minister; Tarak Nath Mukherjee as waterways minister; Fazlur Rahman as land minister; and Dwarka Nath Barury as works minister.
Direct Action riots
Suhrawardy's tenure as premier saw the Great Calcutta Killings in 1946. The Muslim League called a strike to press its demand for the creation of Pakistan. The strike degenerated into brutal and widespread Hindu-Muslim riots in which thousands were killed on both sides. The riots were seen by some as the last nail in the coffin for Hindu-Muslim unity in British India.