Sher-e-Bangla AK Fazlul Huq passed away in 1962. He was 89 when the end came. Next month, we will be paying homage to him, as we have done over the years, on the anniversary of his death. And yet there is a paramount requirement, in the interest of history, to revisit Huq and reflect on the politics he represented and the crucial role he played not only in Bengal, but also in an all-India context.
There has been a fairly good degree of research done on him, but there is, all these decades after Sher-e-Bangla’s passing from the scene, a fresh need to project him and the times he was part of and influenced in a major way.
There are the truths about Huq’s career, an important one being his role in the creation of Pakistan. The fact that he moved the resolution of the All-India Muslim League, envisaging the creation of independent states for the Muslims of India, in March 1940 is an indelible part of his politics. We have, through the years, remarked on the powerful presence Huq made at the Lahore conference of the League that adopted the resolution, a presence that certainly did not make Mohammad Ali Jinnah happy. Jinnah’s comment, “When the tiger is here, the lamb must take leave,” was enough to indicate his unhappiness and envy at Huq’s popularity.
And here comes into the picture the other side of the Fazlul Huq mystique. It is this history which we need to rediscover, indeed retrieve from the archives of memory for the generations which were born and which came of age in the decades since 1962 in the three nations -- Bangladesh, Pakistan, India -- that once were one whole country.
Huq’s differences with Jinnah began to surface barely a year after the Lahore conference, in 1941. Mass leader and suave individual that Huq was, it was hard for him to take lying down Jinnah’s autocratic leadership of the Muslim League. A man who had already demonstrated little patience with senior officials of the British colonial government, Huq was not willing to let Jinnah’s self-obsession go by without any challenge.
Sher-e-Bangla’s popularity was rooted among his people in Bengal, a region where he did not wish to see the Muslim League take roots. In the event, he was overtaken by the communal politics the League pursued with frenzy in the province.
Jinnah apart, there were all the men in the Bengal Muslim League who were determined to see the back of Huq through pushing him out of the office of prime minister of Bengal. Many of the figures beholden to Jinnah and determined to achieve Pakistan went out on a limb to undermine Huq, leading to a situation where he needed to keep his government going through fresh alliance-building with Sarat Bose, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, and others.
The problem for Huq, insofar as his rivals were concerned, were his links with the masses as also the independence he brought to bear on his political beliefs. Huq was a political leader whose streak of individualism mattered more to him than an acceptance of irrational collectivism. Where Huq was revered by the masses, his enemies on the Bengal political landscape remained confined to politics restricted to the drawing room.
Fazlul Huq’s association with the masses came through in his defining role over an abolition of the zamindari system. The Bengal Tenancy Act comes to mind, and with that the election manifesto of the Krishak Praja Party in 1936 prior to the elections of 1937. And let us not look away from the fact that the Krishak Praja Party was symbolic of the interests of the have-nots in Bengal.
And these have-nots, in Huq’s conception of things, were not confined to the communal, but straddled the secular. It was a Bengali organization. Nothing Hindu or Muslim was there about it. Huq did have a role in Muslim politics, of course, but his philosophy remained, throughout his career, on the heights of secular liberalism. One needs to go back to his days as Mayor of Calcutta to envisage the nature of the leadership he would provide to his people in the times ahead.
Recovering his moorings
There was in him a particular sort of dedication to the idea of a united India, a political position he began to reassert in 1941. Had he begun to regret his role in March 1940? Let it be said that by 1941, he had begun to rediscover his political moorings. Bengal, and by extension India, needed to be one indivisible whole.
That Sher-e-Bangla was immersed fully in the traditions of Bengal was made clear through his emphasis on a common Bengali heritage, beyond and above religious divisions, on his visit to Calcutta soon after taking over as chief minister of East Bengal in 1954. That expression of sentiment was employed against him by the ruling classes in Karachi as they went about dismantling the United Front ministry in May 1954.
But it did little to undermine popular confidence in Fazlul Huq’s faith in the continuity of Bengali tradition in terms of both politics and culture. As a man who had served singularly well as mayor of Calcutta and prime minister of Bengal, Huq was eminently qualified to serve as chief minister of the eastern part of a truncated Bengal. But the agents of intrigue ensconced in Karachi would not let him do his job.
A whole range of questions came up when, after 1954, Sher-e-Bangla took office as central interior minister in Pakistan and later as governor of East Pakistan. Age was beginning to take its toll on him, but it did not diminish his intellectual faculties. To what extent he was able to fulfill his calling as a central minister, to what degree the West Pakistan-based ruling classes meant to have some of Huq’s good reputation rub off on them remain questions that call for research.
Where he was a pivotal force in, indeed the symbol of the United Front in 1954, by 1955 Huq’s differences with Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy had become public knowledge. Those differences were a throwback to the 1940s when Suhrawardy, Khwaja Nazimuddin, and the Muslim League engaged in a war of attrition with Fazlul Huq when the latter served as prime minister of United Bengal.
It is time for a reappraisal of Sher-e-Bangla AK Fazlul Huq’s political role in pre-partition as also post-partition South Asia. He was a brilliant man, never willing to cave in before humbugs, before all the mediocre men strutting about on the political stage.
His command of the law remains legendary. His use of language, Bengali as well as English and Urdu, should be a reminder to the political classes in present-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh of the sophistication that was the hallmark of his politics. Huq’s understanding of mathematics was proved early on in his life. That he loved the good things of life, that he was a thoroughly well-read individual, that he was never a blind follower of ordinary individuals masquerading as political giants are the image we and the generation before ours have preserved.
Sher-e-Bangla’s reputation as the first politician to engage with the masses of Bengal has endured. His roots mattered even as cosmopolitanism began to underscore his politics on the national stage. Whether he was in the Congress or the Muslim League or the Krishak Praja Party, communing with people was the principle he did not let go of.
And that is a good reason why Sher-e-Bangla needs restoration, in substantive manner, in the political narrative of the Bengali nation, both here in Bangladesh and over there in West Bengal.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer.
