Syed Hussain Imam (21 February 1897 – 16 January 1985), who appears in the official record of his lifetime as Hussain Imam and in the Indian parliamentary record as Abu Abdullah Saiyid Hussain Imam, was an Indian politician from Gaya in Bihar and a leader of the All-India Muslim League.
Imam sat in the Council of State, the upper house of the Indian legislature, from 1931 until its dissolution in 1947, representing the Bihar and Orissa (Muhammadan) constituency. He founded the Council's Progressive Party in 1932 and was its deputy leader, and by 1936 was leading the opposition in the house; by 1941 he led the Muslim League party in it. In that capacity he was one of the twenty-two delegates to the Simla Conference convened by the Viceroy, Lord Wavell, in June 1945. He was received by the Cabinet Mission in April 1946 and by Lord Mountbatten in April 1947. In January 1947 Wavell decided to appoint him President of the Council of State in succession to Sir Maneckji Dadabhoy.
His legislative work was largely economic and financial. He moved in the Council of State the bill that became the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 1937; drafted three bills of his own, including one to place the principal mosques of Delhi under an elected committee; signed three published minutes of dissent on the bills constituting the Reserve Bank of India and the Imperial Bank of India; and in 1935 moved and carried a resolution enfranchising women for elections to the Council.
Within the Muslim League he moved resolutions from the Allahabad session of December 1930 onwards, was a member of the Working Committee from 1941, one of the three members of its Central Parliamentary Board from 1943, and president of the Bihar Provincial Muslim League from 1945 to 1947.
Elected to the Constituent Assembly of India from Bihar in 1946, Imam remained in India after partition. He sat on its Panel of Chairmen and presided over sittings of the house, signed the Constitution of India in January 1950, and continued in the Indian parliament until 1951, when he migrated to Pakistan. In Pakistan he presided over the East African Muslim Conference at Nairobi in December 1953 and chaired a Government of Pakistan fact-finding committee on handlooms that reported in 1956. He died in Karachi in 1985.
Early life and education
Hussain Imam was born on 21 February 1897 at Gaya, then in the Bengal Presidency and from 1912 in the province of Bihar and Orissa. He was the son of Haji Syed Ali Imam. The same source records that he was educated privately, that he married in 1916, and that he was "for some time Municipal Commissioner, Gaya"; his permanent address is given as "Hussain Manzil", Gaya. He had a brother, Syed Hasan Imam, a poet and writer in Urdu, who died at Karachi on 23 April 1961.
A contemporary "Who's Who in India" entry published in The Indian Year Book for 1938–39 states that he went to England in 1913 and joined the Imperial College of Science, but was recalled in 1915; that he afterwards studied agriculture at the Sabour Institution, the agricultural college at Sabour, near Bhagalpur; that he "took no active interest in politics up to 1928"; and that he was elected to the Council of State in September 1930.
According to the biography of Imam published by Arshad Syed Karim in 1992, he first learned Urdu, Persian and Arabic at home and was sent with his brother to school at Barh; he was admitted in 1909 to the collegiate school attached to the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh; he went to England in March 1913 and entered Imperial College in 1914, returning to India early in 1915 after the outbreak of the First World War; he took part in the Home Rule and Khilafat movements and managed his family's landholdings; and his wife was a granddaughter of Mr Justice Sharfuddin. Karim's account of the London years agrees with the 1938–39 Year Book as to the college and, within a year, as to the dates; the schooling at Aligarh has not been confirmed from an independent source, and the 1950 Who's Who names no school or college.
Council of State
Election and first session Imam was elected to the Council of State for the Bihar and Orissa (Muhammadan) constituency in September 1930 and took his seat at the session that opened at New Delhi on 10 February 1931, when the newly constituted Council met and forty-seven new members were sworn in. On 11 February, the day after he was sworn in, he asked the house to "overlook the shortcomings of a new Member" and moved a resolution that it "does not favour indirect election for the Council of State", urging that the existing electorate be retained and proposing that the house be enlarged to 120 members, of whom 80 should be elected. He observed that all the provincial governments but one or two had recommended direct election, and that the Government of India had accepted indirect election "merely out of deference for the Simon Commission".
Within a fortnight he had also moved for a committee of seven members of both chambers to advise the Government on its loan operations; for a boundaries commission on the amalgamation with Bihar of the permanently settled districts of the United Provinces and Bengal lying on its border; and for a committee of experts and legislators to frame a scheme for the Indianisation of the Indian Army. In the same year he moved for a retrenchment committee on the model of the Geddes Committee and for an inquiry into the working of the Tata Iron and Steel Company, both of which he withdrew. He was appointed to one of the Government of India's Retrenchment Committees in 1931, a membership he recalled in the Indian parliament in 1948.
He remained a member of the Council for the rest of its existence. He is listed for the same constituency in The Indian Year Book for 1937–38 and in that work's member rolls from 1932–33 to 1946; he is styled M.C.S.—Member of the Council of State—in the Muslim League's official publications through to 1943; and he is described by Jinnah in June 1946 as "Member, Council of State".
Economic and financial legislation His parliamentary work was largely economic and financial, ranging over the Reserve Bank of India Bill, tariff and textile protection, successive finance and income-tax bills, company law, public borrowing, the silver holdings of the Paper Currency Reserve and the condition of agriculturists. In 1933 he sat on the joint committees of both houses on the Reserve Bank of India Bill and the Imperial Bank of India Bill, and signed three published minutes of dissent on their reports.
On the Reserve Bank Bill he joined eight other members in a minute seeking directors elected by the chambers of commerce and the provincial co-operative banks, local boards, and "preference in allotment to small subscribers", and added a minute of his own in seven numbered points. In it he proposed dividing the Bank's capital into shares of one hundred rupees reserved to Indian subjects of the Crown and shares of five hundred rupees open to all, with a maximum of ten votes to any person; objected to the Bank's power to borrow money in India as "an innovation upon central banking practice"; argued for the inclusion of sterling securities among the assets of the Issue Department; proposed that a bank's deposits, and not its capital and reserves alone, should determine whether it was a scheduled bank; and urged that rupee coin be made legal tender only up to one hundred rupees, so as to "popularise notes". On the eighteen-pence ratio he wrote that its maintenance "will be too great a strain for the Bank", and that the Bank's failure "is bound to retard constitutional reform". On the Imperial Bank Bill he signed a minute on the powers of the local boards, and a second, with Nripendranarayan Sinha and Sant Singh, arguing that the Bank should be authorised to lend on the mortgage of immovable property because the position of the land-owning classes in the depression made such relief "highly incumbent upon the legislature".
In 1936 he moved a resolution urging India's withdrawal from the League of Nations, telling the house that India was "like a shareholder in a company and when the managing agents mismanaged the shareholder could only get out of the concern", and citing the failure of disarmament, the conquest of Abyssinia and the working of the mandates. The Government opposed withdrawal; a substitute moved by Sir Phiroze Sethna for a substantial reduction in India's contribution was accepted and carried on 22 September 1936 by 35 votes to none. On 30 March 1936, on the certified Finance Bill—the third certified measure of the year—The Indian Annual Register records that "Mr. Hossain Imam led the Opposition", arguing that "it was far better to abolish the Legislatures than every time impose an Executive decree".
In April 1945, in the debate on the financial settlement between Britain and India, the Congress member Manu Subedar proposed that any commission of enquiry should consist of three opposition leaders from the Legislative Assembly "and probably Mr. Hossain Imam from the Council of State". On 9 November 1944 he moved, unsuccessfully, for a committee of inquiry into the coal industry with power to consider compulsory amalgamation or nationalisation, and on 27 March 1945 the Council passed without division his resolution for the protection of the cotton dyeing and printing cottage industry. In November 1943 he moved that the Council recommend "adequate and generous financial help of at least seven crores to the Government of Bengal" during the famine, telling the house that Bengal was "in the midst of a catastrophe the like of which has never visited any part of India"; the resolution was withdrawn.
Civil liberties and constitutional questions In 1931 Imam moved that the Indian Press (Emergency Powers) Bill be referred to a select committee, saying that while he agreed with the principle of the measure he "refused to be a party to the taking away of the liberty of the press". He tabled a series of amendments taken from the dissenting minute of five members of the Legislative Assembly headed by Sir Hari Singh Gour, and sought a new clause providing that on the expiry of the Act any money or property forfeited under it be refunded on application. In April 1932 he opposed the bill providing for the transfer of detenus, saying that detention without trial was unjustifiable on any ground, and in the same year he opposed the Bengal Suppression of Terrorist Outrages Bill on the ground that the Government had not used joint select-committee procedure for a measure "affecting the liberties of the people of a vast country". He supported resolutions for the release of political prisoners and detenus and spoke repeatedly on the condition of the prisoners in the Andamans.
On 18 September 1935 he moved that the Council recommend "to remove the sex disqualification and to enfranchise the women having requisite qualification to vote at the Council of State elections", telling the house that it had "the unenviable distinction of being the only legislative body which makes sex the reason of disqualification for women". The motion was adopted. In March 1936 he supported Sir Ramunni Menon's resolution removing the remaining sex disqualifications for election or nomination to the Council, which passed without a dissentient voice.