A. K. Fazlul Huq

Abul Kasem Fazlul Huq was born on October 26, 1873, in the district of Barishal in eastern Bengal, then part of British India ^[1]. His father, Kazi Muhammad Wazed, practiced law in the district courts, and the family belonged to the small but growing class of educated Bengali Muslims who could afford professional training for their sons. The riverine countryside of Barishal, dense with jute fields and tenant smallholdings, gave the young Fazlul Huq an early education in the economics of rural debt that later defined his politics ^[2].

He proved an unusually able student. After schooling in Barishal he moved to Calcutta, where he studied at Presidency College and took degrees in chemistry, mathematics, and physics before completing a law degree at the University of Calcutta ^[1]. Contemporaries recalled a quick memory and a gift for argument in both Bengali and English, talents that served him first at the bar and then on the public platform.

He was called to legal practice around the turn of the century, working for a period under Ashutosh Mookerjee, the celebrated jurist and educationist, before returning to build his own practice ^[3]. A short stint in government service as a deputy magistrate ended when he resigned to practice law independently in Barishal, a decision that freed him for public life.

Fazlul Huq entered organized politics through the institutions available to Bengali Muslims in the first decade of the twentieth century. He attended the 1906 Dacca conference at which the All-India Muslim League was founded, placing him among the earliest members of the party he would later both lead and quarrel with ^[4]. In 1913 he won election to the Bengal Legislative Council, beginning an electoral career that lasted, with few interruptions, into the 1950s ^[1].

His positions in these years show a politician comfortable working across communal lines. He served as a general secretary of the Indian National Congress in 1916 and 1917 while simultaneously holding office in the Muslim League, and he took part in the negotiations that produced the Lucknow Pact of 1916, the wartime agreement between the two organizations on constitutional reform and separate electorates ^[4]. In 1918 he was elected president of the All-India Muslim League itself ^[3].

What set Fazlul Huq apart from most Muslim League politicians of his generation was his base. His following lay not among landlords and urban professionals but among the Muslim cultivators of eastern Bengal, whose grievances over rent, debt, and the power of the zamindars he voiced with theatrical force. In 1929 he helped organize the Nikhil Banga Praja Samiti, a tenants' association, and in 1936 this movement became the Krishak Praja Party, a party built around agrarian demands such as debt relief and the abolition of landlordism ^[2]. Its slogan of rice and lentils for the cultivator gave the 1937 election campaign an economic edge that communal parties could not match.

The Government of India Act of 1935 created provincial governments answerable to elected legislatures, and the 1937 elections made Fazlul Huq the most powerful man in Bengal. The Krishak Praja Party won a substantial bloc of seats, and after coalition talks with the Congress failed, Huq formed a ministry with the Muslim League and independent members. On April 1, 1937, he took office as the first Prime Minister (Premier) of Bengal, governing a province of some sixty million people ^[1].

His ministry passed measures aimed squarely at the rural debtor. The Bengal Agricultural Debtors Act of 1936 was put into operation through debt settlement boards, and amendments to the Bengal Tenancy Act in 1938 strengthened the position of tenant cultivators against landlords ^[2]. His government also expanded educational opportunity for Muslims and backward communities; Huq had earlier been associated with the founding of Islamia College in Calcutta in 1926, and education remained a personal cause throughout his career ^[3].

The most consequential act of these years came outside Bengal. At the Muslim League session in Lahore in March 1940, it was Fazlul Huq who moved the resolution demanding that Muslim-majority regions of northwestern and eastern India be grouped into independent states. The Lahore Resolution, later called the Pakistan Resolution, became the founding document of the Pakistan movement, and Huq's role as its mover gave him a permanent place in the history of the subcontinent's partition ^[4]. Yet within two years he had broken with Muhammad Ali Jinnah over the League's authority to dictate to provincial premiers. Expelled from the League in 1941, he formed a second ministry in December of that year with the support of Shyama Prasad Mookerjee of the Hindu Mahasabha, a coalition known as the Shyama-Huq ministry, which held office until the governor forced his resignation in March 1943 ^[1].

Partition in 1947 divided Bengal, and Fazlul Huq, now in his seventies, chose Pakistan and settled in Dhaka in East Bengal. He served for a period as Advocate General of East Bengal, returning to the law that had been his first profession ^[3]. Many observers assumed his political career was over. The assumption was wrong.

By the early 1950s discontent in East Bengal with the central government in Karachi was rising, fed by the language movement of 1952 and by economic grievances. Huq joined with Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy and Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani to build the United Front, an opposition coalition whose twenty-one point program demanded provincial autonomy and recognition of Bengali. In the provincial election of March 1954 the United Front crushed the ruling Muslim League, which was reduced to a handful of seats, and Fazlul Huq became Chief Minister of East Bengal on April 3, 1954 ^[5].

The ministry lasted less than two months. Following labor unrest and remarks by Huq during a visit to Calcutta that his critics presented as disloyal to Pakistan, the central government dismissed his government on May 30, 1954, and imposed governor's rule ^[5]. Characteristically, Huq recovered. He served as Pakistan's central Minister of the Interior in 1955 and 1956, and from 1956 to 1958 he held the office of Governor of East Pakistan, until the imposition of martial law by Ayub Khan ended parliamentary politics across the country ^[1].

Fazlul Huq married three times over the course of a long life; his son A. K. Faezul Huq, born in 1945, later followed him into politics and served as a minister in Bangladesh ^[6]. Accounts by contemporaries describe a man of enormous appetite, boundless generosity, and famous carelessness with money, who gave away much of what he earned at the bar and died far from wealthy.

His oratory was legendary in both Bengali and English, and he cultivated a public style closer to the village storyteller than to the drawing-room politician. The title Sher-e-Bangla, the Tiger of Bengal, was popularly bestowed on him and remains the name by which Bangladeshis know him; institutions from an agricultural university to a national cricket stadium in Dhaka carry it today ^[6].

He kept his connection with Barishal all his life, funding schools and supporting students from the district. Education was the charity closest to him: he backed hostels, scholarships, and colleges for Muslim students at a time when Bengali Muslims lagged badly in access to higher education ^[3].

The martial law regime of 1958 removed Fazlul Huq from the governorship of East Pakistan and closed the last chapter of his official career ^[1]. He was then eighty-five years old and had held elected or appointed office, in one form or another, for more than four decades under two different states.

He spent his final years in Dhaka, honored as an elder statesman even by those who had opposed him. He died there on April 27, 1962, at the age of eighty-eight ^[1]. He was buried in Dhaka on the grounds now known as the Mausoleum of Three Leaders, near Dhaka University, where he lies beside Khwaja Nazimuddin and Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, the two other Bengali politicians who had alternated with him at the summit of the region's politics ^[6].

Anyone asking who was A. K. Fazlul Huq confronts a career that resists simple labels. He led the Muslim League and was expelled from it; he governed with the Hindu Mahasabha and with agrarian populists; he moved the resolution that created Pakistan and then became a symbol of Bengali resistance to Pakistani centralism. Historians generally read this flexibility not as opportunism alone but as fidelity to a single constituency, the Bengali peasant, whose interests he pursued through whatever alliance was available ^[2].

Among A. K. Fazlul Huq achievements, three carry the greatest weight: the agrarian legislation of his Bengal premiership, which gave tenant cultivators real legal protections; the moving of the Lahore Resolution in 1940; and the United Front victory of 1954, which historians treat as an early landmark on the road to Bengali self-assertion and, eventually, the independence of Bangladesh in 1971 ^[5].

In Bangladesh his memory is officially cherished. Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University, Sher-e-Bangla Medical College in Barishal, the Sher-e-Bangla National Cricket Stadium, and Sher-e-Bangla Nagar, the government quarter of Dhaka, all bear his popular title ^[6]. For students gathering A. K. Fazlul Huq facts, the essential ones are simple: a Barishal lawyer, born in 1873, who became the first Premier of Bengal, gave the Pakistan movement its founding resolution, and spent sixty years insisting that the cultivators of Bengal deserved a government that noticed them.